Staff Software Engineer, Search Platform

Role Description

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Search team, you will be the senior technical owner of the Search Platform: the Search Engine, the Indexing Pipeline that feeds it, and Availability, which determines which restaurants can fulfill an order. This is a hands-on technical leadership role.

• Own the Search Engine architecture: technology direction (Vespa-based), document schema, query serving, and operational model.
• Own and build the Indexing Pipeline: Temporal-orchestrated workflows that ingest, validate, transform, and write data into the search engine and availability store.
• Own Availability: zone-based delivery filtering, schedule matching, and the data model that powers it - extracted from the legacy monolith and re-implemented.
• Own the Two-Stage Filtering Architecture: zone-based availability filtering followed by Vespa filtering and ranking.
• Drive search relevance and ranking strategy across ordering contexts and customer types, in collaboration with product and data.
• Define clear, well-versioned APIs and contracts for how search and availability are consumed across all channels.
• Manage migration sequencing and risk across the phased rollout (Typeahead, Availability, Core Search).
• Build a measurement and experimentation foundation supporting full-funnel evaluation, from CTR through order fulfillment.
• Lead through collaborative design: white-boarding, technical discussions, and aligning teams around clear architectural decisions.
• Partner with Platform Engineering on shared service patterns, Temporal, observability, secrets, and CI/CD.
• Partner with product, data, and downstream consumers on relevance, ranking signals, and API contracts.
• Act as a technical multiplier through design reviews, code reviews, architectural guidance, and mentorship.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Deep experience designing, building, and tuning search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch, Vespa, or equivalent); experience leading a major search re-architecture or building from scratch is strongly preferred; Vespa experience is a significant plus.
• Strong proficiency in Go, or a willingness to adopt it as a primary language.
• Experience with real-time data pipelines (Kafka, event streaming) for search indexing.
• Strong instincts for relevance and ranking, with the ability to translate product goals into ranking signals and evaluate them with data.
• Excellent written and verbal communication around collaborative system design and technical decision-making.
• A pragmatic, collaborative mindset with strong ownership and systems thinking.
• Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, or equivalent) is a plus.
• Familiarity with geospatial systems and spatial filtering is a plus.

Requirements

• The national total target cash compensation range for this position, including base salary and bonus target, is $184,000–$232,000 annually.
• Please note: Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise and region & may vary from the amount above.
• This range does not represent additional compensation benefits (such as equity, 401K or medical, dental or vision insurance).
• ezCater does not sponsor applicants for work visas or legal permanent residence.

Benefits

• Market competitive salary.
• Stock options that you’ll help make worth a lot.
• 12 paid holidays.
• Flexible PTO.
• 401K with ezCater match.
• Health/dental/FSA.
• Long-term disability insurance.
• Mental health and family planning resources.
• Remote-hybrid work from our awesome Boston office OR your home OR a mixture of both home and office.
• A tremendous amount of responsibility and autonomy.
• Wicked awesome co-workers.
• Employee meal program (and many more goodies) when you’re in our office.
• Knowing that you helped transform the food for work space.

Company Description

ezCater is the #1 food tech platform for workplaces in the US. The company makes it easy for any organization to manage its food needs and order from over 125,000 restaurants nationwide. For workplaces, ezCater provides flexible and scalable solutions for everything from employee meal programs to one-off meetings, all backed by beyond helpful 24/7 service and business-grade reliability.