Staff Software Engineer - Backend

GoDaddy

2d•$140,000 - $273,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At GoDaddy, we're on a mission to radically shift the global economy toward small businesses by empowering people to easily start, confidently grow, and successfully run their own ventures. The Domain Search team builds the foundational search and discovery infrastructure that powers GoDaddy's domain marketplace and helps millions of entrepreneurs find, evaluate, and manage domain names. Our platform sits at the center of the domain purchasing journey, connecting customer intent with highly relevant, personalized recommendations at global scale. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for the search infrastructure that supports multiple products and teams across GoDaddy. You will help drive the evolution of our platform into an intelligent, personalized search experience capable of understanding customer intent, learning from behavioral signals, and delivering highly relevant domain recommendations. This role combines hands-on engineering excellence with architectural leadership. You'll influence technical strategy, guide cross-functional initiatives, mentor engineers, and help shape the future of search and discovery at GoDaddy.

Requirements

8+ years building and operating large-scale distributed software systems in production environments.
Expert knowledge of search technologies, information retrieval, ranking systems, recommendation platforms, or related domains.
Strong software engineering fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, system design, and software architecture.
Deep experience with cloud-native development, microservices, APIs, and AWS-based infrastructure.
Advanced proficiency in Java, Go, C#, or similar object-oriented programming languages.
Experience integrating machine learning models into customer-facing production systems.
Demonstrated ability to lead technical strategy and architecture across multiple teams.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Lucene, Vespa, or similar search technologies.
Experience building recommendation systems, personalization platforms, or ML-powered customer experiences.
Knowledge of semantic search, vector databases, embeddings, LLM-powered retrieval, or agentic AI systems.
Experience with Kafka, Spark, Flink, or large-scale real-time and batch data processing platforms.
Experience utilizing AI-powered engineering tools to improve software development and delivery.

Responsibilities

Architect and evolve large-scale search infrastructure that powers domain discovery for millions of customers, designing distributed indexing, retrieval, ranking, and recommendation systems that deliver high performance, scalability, and reliability.
Build intelligent search experiences by developing relevance, personalization, and recommendation capabilities that leverage customer intent, behavioral signals, machine learning models, and modern AI technologies to improve search quality and conversion.
Lead technical strategy and architectural decisions across search services, APIs, data platforms, and cloud-native systems, influencing engineering direction across multiple teams and products.
Engineer highly scalable backend services and distributed systems in AWS, solving complex challenges involving latency, availability, fault tolerance, observability, and operational efficiency at global scale.
Write high-quality production code, drive adoption of modern engineering practices, mentor other engineers, and lead the delivery of complex technical initiatives from design through production while continuously raising the organization's technical bar.