Staff Software Engineer, Search

Babylist

1d•$233,500 - $290,700•Remote

About The Position

Babylist is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to serve as technical lead for a new Search team. The role will build Babylist’s search capability in-house, making results more relevant and personalized and partnering across teams to improve search throughout the product. Babylist’s universal registry spans many retailers and contains products with meaningful stakes for families, making registry search and personalization a complex consumer e-commerce problem. This is a zero-to-one role with a mandate to build a new search system from the ground up. The first-year goals include rebuilding search for relevance and personalization and delivering universal search across Babylist and other retailers, products, guides, and registries. The role will also explore how large language models can contribute to search in partnership with Addie, Babylist’s AI registry assistant. The Staff Engineer sets technical direction, chooses and sequences initiatives, makes technical and product decisions, and remains hands-on in the code while driving work across teams. The position has software engineering and machine learning engineering support. It also carries broader Staff Engineer responsibilities, including taking ambiguous problems through production and measuring customer impact, building platforms and tooling adopted by other teams, establishing effective AI development practices and evaluations, partnering with product, design, and data, and coaching Senior engineers. Babylist’s engineering environment uses AI by default, with agentic sessions for much of the work and human ownership of outcomes. The architecture is a Rails monolith with MySQL and few moving parts. The stack includes Rails, Packwerk, React, TypeScript, Sidekiq, iOS Swift, Android Kotlin, MySQL, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Weaviate, WarpStream, Hex, Sigma, machine learning technologies, AWS SageMaker, MLflow, Claude Code, Devin, Linear, CodeRabbit, Warden, LangChain, Bedrock AgentCore, Maxim, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog, incident.io, and LaunchDarkly. Babylist is an independent, profitable company that reported more than $750 million in revenue in 2025 and has been profitable for eight years. Its engineering team is around 65 people. The company is remote-first across the US and Canada, with company-wide in-person gatherings twice a year. Teams are small, typically three to five engineers, and engineers regularly engage with customers through interviews, session recordings, and support interactions. For a US-based Staff Engineer, the starting base salary range is $233,500–$290,700, plus a target annual bonus of 20% of base, meaningful equity, and a 401(k) match. The starting point within the salary range depends on experience; compensation may grow with performance and scope.

Requirements

Meet Babylist’s Staff Engineer bar, with enough experience shipping production systems to have well-founded technical judgment while remaining open to new information.
Have changed how a team builds with AI in a way that was adopted and sustained.
Have hands-on experience building and operating production search systems, including indexing, retrieval, ranking, and query understanding.
Know how to keep search fast, relevant, and reliable as traffic and catalog size grow.
Have experience evaluating search quality offline and online, including relevance judgments and A/B tests.
Use query data, user behavior, and judgment about result quality to guide work, and connect search changes to shopper behavior and conversion or revenue.
Be able to define an ambiguous problem, design a system, and own it end to end.
Measure impact through customer outcomes or systems that other teams depend on.

Nice To Haves

Prior search experience in an e-commerce setting.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for Babylist search over the next year or two, sequence initiatives, and make technical and product decisions.
Build search in-house by choosing architecture for indexing, retrieval, and serving, and planning a seamless migration from the current system.
Define measures of search-result quality and improve results through query understanding, ranking, and behavioral signals.
Unify search across products, guides, and registries, including items Babylist sells and items from other retailers.
Determine how search and recommendations fit together, using user and registry information and deciding how retrieval and ranking relate to recommendation models.
Partner with the Addie team to develop conversational search experiences for shoppers expressing needs rather than naming products.
Take ambiguous business problems from early definition through production and remain accountable for customer impact.
Build and own platforms or tools that other teams choose to adopt, maintaining them as they scale.
Establish effective AI development patterns and evaluations for search, including ways to detect confidently incorrect output before release.
Partner with product, design, and data as a peer and help shape what is worth building.
Coach Senior engineers through technical and ambiguous decisions.
Work across teams and remain hands-on in code to advance search initiatives.
Stay close to customers through activities such as user interviews, session recordings, and support interactions.