Search Engineer

About the company

Our client is a fast-growing software company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Take charge of the relevance and performance of a large-scale search platform, combining backend engineering with hands-on ranking work. The position carries full responsibility for services across their lifecycle, from initial design through live operation.

What you'll do

• Lead efforts to improve the quality of results returned by a retrieval system.
• Build the data collection, indexing and query-serving components of a search offering.
• Bring down response times and the cost of each query as traffic increases.
• Take full responsibility for services from first design through launch, monitoring and ongoing refinement.
• Collaborate with search leadership and peers to shape the technical plan.

Requirements

What we're looking for

• At least 3 years as the primary owner of the indexing and query-serving layers of a live search engine operating at meaningful scale.
• A track record of ranking improvements you drove, with the measured business or quality result to show for it.
• Practical experience tuning result relevance with techniques such as keyword scoring, embedding-based retrieval and result re-ordering, on an engine you run.
• Backend programming skill in Go, Rust, Python or a comparable language.
• A balanced focus on speed, cost and correctness when running search services under heavy query load.
• Comfort turning loosely defined problems into working systems, preferring to release, measure and adjust.
• Ability to work on-site five days a week in San Francisco or Toronto, either already local or relocating before starting.

Bonus points

• Background at a company where search is the main product, such as web search, AI-powered search or large marketplace search.
• Time spent at a young, rapidly growing company.

Benefits

Compensation and benefits

• Base salary: USD 235,000 to 260,000 per year
• Equity
• Health, dental and vision coverage
• Life and disability insurance
• Retirement plan
• Paid time off
• Paid parental leave

Location and work model

• San Francisco, CA, United States or Toronto, ON, Canada
• On-site, five days a week
• Full-time