What You’ll Do
- Lead delivery and technical quality across query serving, indexing, availability, and the APIs and contracts other teams depend on.
- Set technical direction for the search stack, including engine architecture, document schema, indexing and query patterns, ranking strategy, and migration sequencing.
- Own the freshness and correctness of the index and the availability domain so customers see restaurants that can actually fulfill an order.
- Stay close to the technical work by reviewing designs, challenging assumptions, and helping the team de-risk architecture and delivery decisions.
- Build a culture of measurement, experimentation, and continuous improvement in search quality, platform reliability, and operational performance.
- Coach, develop, and grow engineers through direct feedback, clear expectations, and a high technical bar for search engineering.
- Prioritize ruthlessly and sequence work effectively to reduce technical risk, improve execution, and unblock downstream teams.
- Partner closely with product, data, AI/ML, and platform engineering on relevance signals, experimentation, personalization, and shared infrastructure.
- Help the team build a strong foundation for the future, with clear ownership boundaries, strong engineering habits, and a platform others can confidently build on.
What You Have
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including experience leading teams or serving as a technical lead in complex backend or platform environments.
- Engineering management experience, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers.
- Deep technical credibility in search or retrieval systems such as Vespa, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Solr, ideally through a major re-architecture or build-from-scratch effort.
- Strong backend depth in distributed, event-driven systems; Go experience is preferred.
- Experience with indexing pipelines, document models, and event-streaming patterns that keep results fresh and correct.
- Strong instincts for relevance and ranking, and the ability to translate product goals into signals, evaluation approaches, and technical decisions.
- Experience with observability, production operations, and safe rollouts for correctness-critical systems.
- The judgment to balance technical depth, people leadership, and cross-functional partnership without losing clarity or ownership.
Compensation & Benefits
The national total target cash compensation range for this position, including base salary and bonus target, is $195,000–$255,000 annually.
Market competitive salary, stock options, 12 paid holidays, flexible PTO, 401K with match, health/dental/FSA, long-term disability insurance, mental health and family planning resources, remote-hybrid work, employee meal program.
