Staff Software Engineer, Search
Babylist · United States
About this role
**Staff Software Engineer, Search (Babylist)** **About the role** We’re hiring a **Staff Software Engineer** to be the technical lead for a new **Search** team at **Babylist**. This is **zero-to-one** work: you’ll build search capability from the ground up, improve relevance and personalization, and partner with other teams to transform search from functional to delightful. Registry building is at the heart of Babylist—parents create universal registries spanning many retailers. That makes search and personalization a uniquely challenging and high-impact problem. **What you’ll own** - **Build search in-house**: choose architecture for indexing, retrieval, and serving; plan a seamless migration. - **Define what a good result is**: decide how to measure quality and improve it via query understanding, ranking, and behavioral signals. - **Unify search across everything**: one experience across items we sell and items from other retailers, including ranking items we don’t sell next to ones we do. - **Connect search + recommendations**: bring user and registry context into results; decide how retrieval/ranking overlaps with recommendation models. - **Make search conversational**: work with **Addie** (AI registry assistant) on queries like “best stroller for urban family.” As a Staff Engineer, you’ll also: - Take a fuzzy business problem from sketch to production and stay accountable for customer impact. - Build platforms/tooling other teams adopt by choice. - Set the standard for how search builds with AI (patterns, evals, and catching confidently-wrong outputs before shipping). - Partner closely with product, design, and data. - Coach senior engineers through hard and ambiguous decisions. **Who you are** - Strong **hands-on search** experience in production (indexing, retrieval, ranking, query understanding). - Experience **evaluating search quality** (offline + online, relevance judgments, A/B tests). - A **user-first mindset**: use query data, behavior, and judgment to connect changes to outcomes (conversion/revenue). - Comfort building **from zero**: define the problem, design the system, and own it end-to-end. - You measure yourself by **impact** (customer outcomes or systems many teams depend on). **Compensation (US)** - Starting base salary range: **$233,500 – $290,700** - Target annual bonus: **20% of base** - Total target cash: **~$280,200 – $348,840** - Plus meaningful equity and a **401(k) match** **How Babylist builds** - **AI is the default**: agentic sessions for much of the work, with a human always owning the outcome. - Simple architecture: **Rails monolith**, **MySQL**, and few moving parts. **Stack (high level)** - Core: **Rails, Packwerk, React, TypeScript, Sidekiq** - Data/search/events: **MySQL, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Weaviate, WarpStream, Hex, Sigma** - ML: **retrieval & ranking**, **AWS SageMaker**, **MLflow** - AI tooling: **Claude Code, Devin, Linear, CodeRabbit, Warden, LangChain, Bedrock AgentCore, Maxim** - Infra/ops: **AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog, incident.io, LaunchDarkly** **Remote & team** - **Remote-first** across the US and Canada. - Small pods (3–5 engineers). You’ll work closely with product/design/data and stay close to customers (user interviews, session recordings, support ride-alongs). **Hiring process** - **Recruiter conversation** (30 min) - **Technical screen** (1 hour) - **Final round** (4 hours; system design, AI-assisted coding, product sense, culture/values) *
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