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