Staff Software Engineer, Search Platform

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. 

You're excited about this opportunity because you will…

• 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.

We're excited about you because you have…

• 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

We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound on August 21, 2023.

Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here .

Compensation

The successful candidate's starting pay will fall within the pay range listed below and is determined based on job-related factors including, but not limited to, skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions.  Base salary is localized according to an employee’s work location. Ranges are market-dependent and may be modified in the future.

In addition to base salary, the compensation for this role includes opportunities for equity grants. Talk to your recruiter for more information.

DoorDash cares about you and your overall well-being. That’s why we offer a comprehensive benefits package to all regular employees, which includes 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). DoorDash also offers medical, dental, and vision benefits, 11 paid holidays, disability and basic life insurance, family-forming assistance, and a mental health program, among others.

To learn more about our benefits, visit our careers page here .

See below for paid time off details:

• For salaried roles: flexible paid time off/vacation, plus 80 hours of paid sick time per year.
• For hourly roles: vacation accrued at about 1 hour for every 25.97 hours worked (e.g. about 6.7 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 3.4 hours/month if working 20 hours/week), and paid sick time accrued at 1 hour for every 30 hours worked (e.g. about 5.8 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 2.9 hours/month if working 20 hours/week).

The national base pay ranges for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado.

I4

$130,600—$192,000 USD

I5

$159,800—$235,000 USD

I6

$193,800—$285,000 USD

About DoorDash

At DoorDash, our mission to empower local economies shapes how our team members move quickly, learn, and reiterate in order to make impactful decisions that display empathy for our range of users—from Dashers to merchant partners to consumers. We are a technology and logistics company that started with door-to-door delivery, and we are looking for team members who can help us go from a company that is known for delivering food to a company that people turn to for any and all goods.

DoorDash is growing rapidly and changing constantly, which gives our team members the opportunity to share their unique perspectives, solve new challenges, and own their careers. We're committed to supporting employees’ happiness, healthiness, and overall well-being by providing comprehensive benefits and perks including premium healthcare, wellness expense reimbursement, paid parental leave and more.

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

We’re committed to growing and empowering a more inclusive community within our company, industry, and cities. That’s why we hire and cultivate diverse teams of people from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe that true innovation happens when everyone has room at the table and the tools, resources, and opportunity to excel.

Statement of Non-Discrimination: In keeping with our beliefs and goals, no employee or applicant will face discrimination or harassment based on: race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, age, gender, marital/domestic partner status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability status, or veteran status. Above and beyond discrimination and harassment based on “protected categories,” we also strive to prevent other subtler forms of inappropriate behavior (i.e., stereotyping) from ever gaining a foothold in our office. Whether blatant or hidden, barriers to success have no place at DoorDash. We value a diverse workforce – people who identify as women, non-binary or gender non-conforming, LGBTQIA+, American Indian or Native Alaskan, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, differently-abled, caretakers and parents, and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply. Thank you to the Level Playing Field Institute for this statement of non-discrimination.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, and any other state or local hiring regulations, we will consider for employment any qualified applicant, including those with arrest and conviction records, in a manner consistent with the applicable regulation.

If you need any accommodations, please inform your recruiting contact upon initial connection.