Indeed Reimagines Architecture and Data Collaboration to Help Job Seekers and Employers

The web has transformed how people search for and find career opportunities — and Indeed is at the forefront. From office managers to maintenance workers and nurses to nutritionists, job seekers searching for the right career fit easily browse listings, research salaries and get to know companies. With more than 3.3 million companies using Indeed to hire and 610 million Job Seeker Profiles,¹ Indeed is the world’s No. 1-ranked job site.²

Connecting the right person to the right job at scale isn’t always so simple. It involves enormous amounts of data from Indeed’s website and business operations. The company relies on Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to power mission-critical reports and insights, streamline collaboration with advertising partners via data clean rooms, and achieve a self-service data lakehouse architecture that ultimately creates a better product for the employers and jobseekers Indeed serves.

Indeed’s massive data lake — which currently contains 52PB of data — serves numerous purposes, including providing a single source of truth for reporting and analytical systems.

Prior to using Snowflake, Indeed relied on a PostgreSQL data warehouse for reporting and analytics, but performance and storage limitations presented challenges. After evaluating multiple solutions, Indeed selected one for its “gold layer” for mission-critical reporting that combined optimal performance, ease of use, near-infinite scalability, and an extensive network of connectors, drivers, programming languages and utilities: Snowflake. 

Implementing Snowflake on AWS helped Indeed modernize its data ecosystem while considerably shortening time to deliver on service-level agreements for key reporting across marketing, revenue, and environmental, social and governance (ESG). With Snowflake’s column-level security through the Horizon Catalog, Indeed can make sure team members can access its repository of data at the right level. 

With granular masking policies, there’s only ever one logical copy of a data set — which greatly simplifies governance and minimizes storage costs. The enhanced reporting and analytics available with Snowflake surfaces key insights about Indeed’s operations and customer interactions.

Indeed’s data engineering teams found themselves increasingly overwhelmed with a backlog of requests as more teams wanted to self-serve data to help drive timely, business-critical decisions and operations. This kicked off an architecture evaluation, landing the team on a lakehouse design. After evaluating other open table format solutions, such as Delta Lake and Apache Hudi™, Apache Iceberg aligned perfectly with Indeed’s plan for a “write once, read anywhere” paradigm because of its extensive and growing ecosystem. 

With a single source of truth for querying data, Indeed’s data engineering team could break down data silos and cut out extra querying steps that cost both time and money. According to Daniel DeMara, Staff Software Engineer at Indeed, “We decided to convert new and old data sets in our data lake to Iceberg format tables in Amazon S3 and integrate with Snowflake.” For each petabyte that is converted into Iceberg table format, Indeed bolsters its data centralization strategy while making it easier for staff to leverage Snowflake’s powerful platform.

With the data lake in Iceberg format, Indeed’s analysts can choose from a variety of solutions — including Snowflake — for querying data in the data lake. During Indeed’s testing, Snowflake delivered significantly greater query performance, and cost savings ranged from 43–74%, depending on load size compared to competing analytical tools like Amazon Athena. Cost-efficient querying, combined with ease of use, and simplified security and governance make Snowflake the preferred solution for Indeed’s data analysts to self-serve. As a result, they can now independently develop analytics, understand user journeys, and inform decisions that impact both employers and job seekers.

Indeed also extends the AI Data Cloud for less technical teams. By combining Snowflake with GrowthLoop — a customer segmentation platform designed for Snowflake — Indeed’s marketers can more effectively acquire and engage customers. Previously, deploying a single marketing campaign took three months to coordinate with analysts, engineers and other teams. Synchronizing data between Indeed’s source systems and campaign destinations made it difficult to build audiences and understand customers. Now, marketers can quickly go from idea to campaign launch — sometimes on the same day — with considerably less assistance from technical staff. 

“Unifying our data on Snowflake and leaning on partners available on the Snowflake Marketplace allowed us to democratize audience-building for our marketers and save a lot of time," says Suresh Susarla, Senior Director of Software Engineering for Marketing Systems at Indeed.

Being able to reliably test things like advertising impact is a key aspect of running successful paid campaigns, but doing so requires using first-party data that may have personally identifiable information (PII). By doing data collaboration with Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, Indeed and its partners securely join first-party audiences with campaign exposure and conversion data, run aggregations, and then compare test group and control group performance. 

“We can measure differences in their behavior on our site by conducting analyses within the data clean room, where we have access to person-level data with PII obscured and anonymized,” says Joe Zucker, Senior Manager, Marketing Analytics at Indeed. As a result, Indeed has achieved a transparent, repeatable incrementality testing workflow for understanding how marketing translates into job seeker profiles, employer accounts and job applications. Marketers leverage these insights to optimize advertising expenditures and, ultimately, save the company millions of dollars.

“The majority of our partners are on Snowflake Data Clean Rooms because we’re able to generalize most easily with Snowflake and reduce as much overhead as possible,” says Zucker. Onboarding new partners to Snowflake Data Clean Rooms is straightforward, which keeps Indeed and its collaborators focused on assessing marketing impact rather than struggling with data sharing logistics.

Snowflake Data Clean Rooms will play an important role in Indeed’s future testing as well, especially for employer-focused campaigns. “Accessing lookalike audiences that are second-party to Indeed, first-party to the publisher, is the frontier for how we can continue refining that audience testing framework,” Zucker says. Indeed also plans to utilize Snowflake Data Clean Rooms for near real-time campaign insights, enabling marketers to optimize even faster. 

As the Indeed data community continues to leverage the “gold layer” of business reporting, some teams are also using it upstream for analytics, data transforms, and eventually perhaps writing to it as well. With a modern data lake that saves costs and a data-driven marketing strategy that connects more customers to the right opportunities, Indeed is making good on its mission: to help more people get jobs. “The trusted partnership we’ve developed has already made an impact on finding technology solutions that will help us achieve our vision,” says Zucker. “We’re very excited about our path ahead with Snowflake.”