# Staff Software Engineer, Search Platform

**Company:** [ezCater](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/ezcater)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $184k – $232k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Vespa, Elasticsearch, Solr, Opensearch, Go, Kafka, Temporal, Airflow, Geospatial Systems, Search Relevance And Ranking
**Posted:** 2026-06-09

> Staff-level technical owner of the Search Platform (Vespa engine, indexing pipeline, availability) at a food-tech marketplace. Sets architecture, drives relevance/ranking, and leads migration from legacy monolith. Requires 8+ years experience and deep search-engine expertise.

## Job Description

## What You'll Do

- Own the Search Engine architecture: technology direction (Vespa-based), document schema, query serving, and operational model
- Own and build the Indexing Pipeline: Temporal-orchestrated workflows that ingest, validate, transform, and write data into the search engine and availability store
- Own Availability: zone-based delivery filtering, schedule matching, and the data model that powers it—extracted from the legacy monolith and re-implemented
- Own the Two-Stage Filtering Architecture: zone-based availability filtering followed by Vespa filtering and ranking
- Drive search relevance and ranking strategy across ordering contexts and customer types, in collaboration with product and data
- Define clear, well-versioned APIs and contracts for how search and availability are consumed across all channels
- Manage migration sequencing and risk across the phased rollout (Typeahead, Availability, Core Search)
- Build a measurement and experimentation foundation supporting full-funnel evaluation, from CTR through order fulfillment
- Lead through collaborative design: white-boarding, technical discussions, and aligning teams around clear architectural decisions
- Partner with Platform Engineering on shared service patterns, Temporal, observability, secrets, and CI/CD
- Partner with product, data, and downstream consumers on relevance, ranking signals, and API contracts
- Act as a technical multiplier through design reviews, code reviews, architectural guidance, and mentorship

## What You Have

- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Deep experience designing, building, and tuning search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch, Vespa, or equivalent); experience leading a major search re-architecture or building from scratch is strongly preferred; Vespa experience is a significant plus
- Strong proficiency in Go, or a willingness to adopt it as a primary language
- Experience with real-time data pipelines (Kafka, event streaming) for search indexing
- Strong instincts for relevance and ranking, with the ability to translate product goals into ranking signals and evaluate them with data
- Excellent written and verbal communication around collaborative system design and technical decision-making
- A pragmatic, collaborative mindset with strong ownership and systems thinking
- Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, or equivalent) is a plus
- Familiarity with geospatial systems and spatial filtering is a plus

## Compensation

- National total target cash compensation range: $184,000–$232,000 annually (base + bonus target)

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