Staff Software Engineer, Search Platform

DoorDash USA•San Francisco, WA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

About the Team We are on a mission to build a reliable, fast, and scalable search platform for DoorDash. This team is responsible for providing capabilities like search indexing, retrieval and ranking to help consumers find the most relevant merchants and products on DoorDash. We work across three dimensions. Scale - DoorDash has millions of merchants and billions of items. We index over a billion documents in our index and serve thousands of QPS running expensive operations on millions of documents per second. This requires the platform to be scalable, reliable, fast, and provide high app quality. Product Velocity - Search powers more than 20 verticals, including Retail, Discovery (Feed), and Ads, with several engineers building new product experiences on top of the platform. This requires the platform to enable product teams to experiment with new ideas with minimal friction. Relevance (aka Quality) - Machine Learning engineers regularly experiment with new relevance algorithms to improve search quality. This requires the platform to provide relevance capabilities like query understanding, multi-stage ranking, and semantic search to improve recall and precision. The team is a part of Core Consumer org, which owns the top of the conversion funnel from the initial landing page to checkout across iOS, Android, and Web platforms. With a universal Search bar on the home page, as Doordash expands into new verticals like Grocery, there is a growing need to help consumers easily find what they want, so the opportunity is massive and we are just getting started! About the Role If you love tackling challenges at the intersection of Information Retrieval, Distributed Systems, Machine Learning, and Product, while working with some of the smartest people in the industry, DoorDash’s Search Platform is the right place for you. In this role, you’ll play a key role in shaping the bedrock of Search by designing and evolving distributed systems spanning areas like indexing, ranking, query planning and query serving. You’ll help define the technical direction, ensure the platform is highly performant, scalable, and reliable. In addition, you will mentor the team, collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to deliver an outsized impact. This role is hybrid with some in-office time expected and will report to an Engineering Manager.

Requirements

B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent
8+ years of industry experience
Passion for reliability & performance - you’ve built and operated large-scale low-latency distributed systems with high availability, and you understand cost vs. performance trade-offs
Strong knowledge of CS fundamentals, system design, and experience with programming languages like Java, C++
Track record of technical leadership - you excel at collaboration, driving high-impact, technically complex projects end-to-end in fast-paced environments, and mentoring other engineers
Demonstrated expertise in Information Retrieval, including areas like query serving, indexing, and ranking

Responsibilities

Lead the vision - Help define the technical direction, contribute to the long-term technical roadmap, and support strategic initiatives in the search platform.
Build for scale, reliability, and efficiency - Lead design and implementation of critical components to evolve the platform to ensure scalable, efficient, low-latency search and retrieval across a large corpus of data.
Improve developer velocity - Drive innovations that reduce time-to-production.
Deliver and inspire high-quality work - Deliver production-ready code and services end-to-end, including performance tuning, and raise the quality bar through code and design reviews.
Collaborate across the Company - Work closely with the Infrastructure, Product, and AI teams across the company to tailor the platform for their specific needs while maintaining a core set of robust, reusable components.
Mentor & Lead - Guide a growing team of engineers. Champion best practices, set coding standards, and conduct design reviews.

Benefits

a 401(k) plan with employer matching
16 weeks of paid parental leave
wellness benefits
commuter benefits match
paid time off and paid sick leave in compliance with applicable laws (e.g. Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act)
medical, dental, and vision benefits
11 paid holidays
disability and basic life insurance
family-forming assistance
a mental health program