The role, as published
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.
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
- Health, dental and vision coverage
- Life and disability insurance
- 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
Compensation, as the posting describes it
- Equity
- Retirement plan