Staff Software Engineer, Search

Description

The company is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead technical direction for a new search team. The team will bring search in-house, make results more relevant and personal, and work with other teams to make search in the product feel genuinely good to use.

Registry building is central to the product. Parents assemble dozens of items, from swaddles to strollers, for friends and relatives to buy and a baby to use. Because registries span many retailers, search and personalization here are among the harder problems in consumer e-commerce.

This is build-from-zero work with a clear mandate from leadership. In the first year, the goal is a search system that is highly relevant and personalized, plus larger projects such as universal search across the company's items, other retailers' items, products, guides and registries. Large language models are also expected to play a role, working with the company's AI registry assistant.

The role is not for tuning a mature search system. It suits someone who has worked on a strong search team and now wants to build a new system at an earlier stage.

The company was started by an engineer who could not find the registry she wanted for her first baby. It serves ten million gift-givers a year, reported over $750M in 2025 revenue (up 45 percent), has been profitable for eight years, and remains independent. The engineering team is around 65 people.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for search over the next one to two years, decide the order of major bets, and make technical and product calls along the way.
• Stay hands-on in the code while driving work across several teams, with software and machine learning engineers supporting the team.
• Lead the move to an in-house search system: choose the architecture for indexing, retrieval and serving, and plan a smooth migration from the current setup. This system becomes the base for everything else.
• Define what result quality means, then improve it through query understanding, ranking and the behavioral data collected.
• Decide how items the company does not sell are ranked alongside items it does, across products, guides and registries.
• Decide how search and recommendations share user and registry context, and how much of retrieval and ranking they share.
• With the AI registry assistant team, support queries where shoppers describe a need instead of naming a product, such as a stroller for an urban family.
• Take fuzzy problems from first sketch to production and stay accountable for whether they helped customers.
• Build platforms or tools that other teams choose to adopt, and own them as they scale.
• Set the bar for building search with AI: define what good looks like, build the patterns and evaluations agents use, and catch confident wrong output before it ships.
• Work as a peer with product, design and data, helping decide what is worth building from the start.
• Mentor senior engineers through hard decisions, both technical and ambiguous ones.
• Stay close to customers through user interviews, session recordings and support ride-alongs, as a regular part of the job.

Requirements

• Staff-level experience: years of shipping production systems, strong opinions held loosely, and the ability to start moving on unclear problems before the full picture is in.
• A record of changing how a team builds with AI, with the new approach sticking.
• Prior search work, ideally in e-commerce, with depth in the systems behind search and a focus on the people using it.
• Hands-on experience running search in production, covering indexing, retrieval, ranking and query understanding, and keeping it fast, relevant and reliable as traffic and catalog size grow.
• Experience measuring search quality offline and online, including relevance judgments and A/B tests.
• Use of query data, behavior and judgment about results to choose what to build, and the ability to tie search changes to shopper actions and to conversion or revenue.
• Comfort building from zero: defining the problem, designing the system and owning it end to end.
• Impact measured by a customer outcome or by a system many teams depend on.

Conditions

For a Canada-based Staff Engineer, base salary starts between $299,300 and $372,600 CAD, with a target annual bonus of 20 percent of base, for total target cash of about $359,160 to $447,120 CAD. Equity is meaningful, and there is an RRSP match. Starting pay depends on experience and grows with performance and scope.

AI is the default for most engineering work, run through agent sessions. Much of the effort goes into the supporting setup: eval harnesses, curated context, custom review skills and fast CI. Agents also triage incidents and handle much of support, but a person always owns the outcome.

The architecture is deliberately simple: one Rails monolith, MySQL and few moving parts, so the team moves quickly and AI can reason about the whole system.

Stack: Rails, Packwerk, React, TypeScript, Sidekiq; iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin); MySQL, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Weaviate, WarpStream, Hex, Sigma; deep learning, matrix factorization, retrieval and ranking, AWS SageMaker, MLflow; Claude Code, Devin, Linear, CodeRabbit, Warden, LangChain, Bedrock AgentCore, Maxim; AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog, incident.io, LaunchDarkly; Shopify (payments), Iterable (CRM).

Remote-first across the US and Canada, with everyone gathering in person twice a year.

Teams are pods of three to five engineers working closely with product, design and data.

Interviews are recorded and transcribed for evaluation, in line with applicable privacy laws.

AI use is welcome in the process, but submitted work and spoken answers should reflect your own thinking.

If you have a family member or close relationship with a company employee, tell your recruiter.

Benefits

• Company-paid medical coverage, with fully covered dental and vision.
• 401(k) match.
• Paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents, plus a gradual return-to-work program.
• A paid company-wide week off at the end of the year.
• Remote-work stipend.
• Mental health and wellness support.