Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search & Recommendation

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States, +1 more country.

📋 Description

• Take charge of the architecture and strategic roadmap for search and recommendations, encompassing query comprehension, retrieval, ranking, search, discovery, home feed, trending features, and creator leaderboards.

• Establish quality metrics for each surface, develop offline evaluation and golden-set tools, and conduct online experiments.

• Design and advance ranking systems, including engagement signal pipelines, models for decay and freshness, and the combination of index-time and live query-time signals.

• Manage OpenSearch in a production environment, focusing on index and mapping design, ensuring reindex and cutover safety, optimizing query performance, and assessing cluster capacity and costs.

• Develop candidate generation and personalization strategies for recommendation surfaces, collaborating with data and machine learning teams on feature pipelines and models.

• Work alongside Product and Trust & Safety teams to set quality gates, address cold-start behaviors, and ensure recommendation safety.

• Implement instrumentation, flag-gated rollouts, and create runbooks.

• Act as the technical liaison for discovery initiatives across backend teams and provide mentorship to engineers.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in building production software, with significant expertise in search, ranking, recommendations, or machine learning-driven relevance within a consumer-scale product.

• Practical knowledge of a production search engine such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Lucene, or Vespa, including index and analyzer design, relevance tuning, and cluster management.

• Experience managing offline evaluations, golden sets, and A/B or interleaving frameworks.

• Proficiency in candidate generation, feature pipelines, embedding retrieval, and re-ranking techniques.

• Solid understanding of distributed systems and backend architecture.

• Production experience in Go or a similar systems programming language.

• Familiarity with SQL data warehouses and both streaming and batch processing pipelines.

• Proven track record of taking ownership in ambiguous areas and achieving measurable outcomes.

• Strong written communication skills and sound judgment regarding relevance, freshness, safety, and latency trade-offs.

• Preferred qualifications include experience with AI-generated or rapidly evolving content catalogs, dealing with severe cold-start scenarios, or ranking under trust-and-safety constraints.

🏝️ Benefits

• Generous company equity.

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance – with 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina.

• 42 days of paid time off, which includes 15 PTO days, 10 sick days, 15 company holidays, and 2 floating holidays.

• Generous parental leave and fertility support.

• 401(k) retirement savings plan.

• Lifestyle spending account – providing $500/month for personal use.

• Complimentary lunch and snacks for employees working in the office.

• One Medical membership.