Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search & Recommendation

Role overview Own the technical direction and delivery of search and recommendation systems for a fast-growing catalog of AI-created characters and videos. The work spans retrieval, ranking, relevance measurement, and the search, discovery, feed, and leaderboard experiences those systems support.

Responsibilities - Set the architecture and roadmap for query understanding, candidate retrieval, ranking, and discovery surfaces. - Define relevance metrics, create offline evaluation datasets and tooling, and run online experiments to assess ranking changes. - Develop engagement signals, freshness and decay models, and a ranking approach that combines indexed features with live re-ranking. - Operate and improve OpenSearch, including index design, safe reindexing, query performance, cost, and cluster capacity. - Build candidate generation and personalization approaches that address new-user and new-content cold starts. - Work with Product on tradeoffs among relevance, freshness, safety, and latency.

Requirements - Extensive experience building and operating search or recommendation systems in production. - Strong knowledge of retrieval and ranking, relevance evaluation, experimentation, and ranking signals. - Production experience with OpenSearch or a comparable search platform, including index and query operations. - Comfort working with data systems such as SQL warehouses and streaming or batch pipelines. - Evidence of owning an ambiguous technical area and setting priorities that produced measurable results. - Clear written communication and sound judgment when balancing product and system constraints.

Nice to have - Experience with AI-generated or rapidly expanding content catalogs, cold-start challenges, or trust-and-safety-aware ranking.

Benefits and work setup - Full-time remote role available in the U.S. or Canada. - Advertised annual base salary range: $250,000–$320,000 USD; equity is also offered. - Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off and holidays, parental and fertility support, a 401(k), a monthly lifestyle spending allowance, and a medical membership.