Staff Software Engineer, Search

Babylist

1d • $233,500 - $290,700 • Remote

About The Position

Babylist is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the technical lead for a new Search team. The team will bring Babylist’s search capability in-house and make search more relevant, personalized, and delightful. This is a zero-to-one opportunity to build a search system from the ground up, with leadership support and software engineering and machine learning engineering support on the team.

The role will set technical direction for search over the next year or two, sequence major initiatives, and make technical and product decisions while remaining hands-on in the code. The first-year goals include rebuilding search for high relevance and personalization and delivering universal search across Babylist and other retailers, products, guides, and registries. The work also includes exploring how large language models and Babylist’s AI registry assistant, Addie, can support the search experience.

The Staff Engineer will partner with product, design, data, and other teams; take ambiguous business problems from initial concept through production; own outcomes for customers; build platforms and tools adopted by other teams; establish patterns and evaluations for AI-assisted development; and coach Senior engineers. Babylist is remote-first across the US and Canada. Teams typically comprise three to five engineers, and the company brings employees together twice a year.

Requirements

• Meet Babylist’s Staff Engineer expectations, with enough experience shipping production systems to develop strong but flexible technical judgment.
• 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 decide what to build, and connect search changes to shopper behavior, conversion, or revenue.
• Be able to define an ambiguous problem, design a system, and own it end to end.
• Have changed how a team builds with AI in a way that was adopted and sustained.
• Be able to drive initiatives across multiple teams while remaining hands-on.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working on search problems in an e-commerce setting.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for search and sequence initiatives over the coming year or two.
• Build search in-house by choosing the architecture for indexing, retrieval, and serving, and planning a seamless migration from the existing system.
• Define and improve search quality through query understanding, ranking, and behavioral signals; establish quality measures and use offline and online evaluation, relevance judgments, and A/B tests.
• Unify search across products sold by Babylist, products from other retailers, guides, and registries, including ranking items Babylist does not sell alongside its own products.
• Determine how search and recommendation systems should work together, incorporating user and registry information and deciding how retrieval and ranking are shared with recommendation models.
• Partner with the Addie team to develop conversational search experiences for shoppers describing needs rather than naming products.
• Take ambiguous business problems from initial concept through production and remain accountable for customer outcomes.
• Build and own platforms or tooling that other teams adopt and that scale with their needs.
• Establish standards, patterns, and evaluations for building with AI, including ways to identify confidently incorrect output before release.
• Partner with product, design, and data as a peer to shape what is worth building.
• Coach Senior engineers through technical and ambiguous decisions.
• Use customer research and feedback, including user interviews, session recordings, and support interactions, as part of regular engineering work.

Benefits

• Company-paid medical insurance and fully covered dental and vision insurance.
• A 401(k) match.
• Generous paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents, plus a gradual return-to-work program.
• Winter Wonder Week, a paid company-wide week off at the end of the year.
• A remote-work stipend.
• Mental-health and wellness support.
• Meaningful equity.
• A target annual bonus of 20 percent of base salary.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed