Lead Architect, Search & Recommendations Engine

Cantina; United States; Remote; USD 250,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Company equity

Health insurance

Paid time off

Parental leave

401(k) retirement plan

Lifestyle spending account

In-office lunch and snacks

One Medical membership

Job summary

Cantina Labs is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer to own search and recommendations end to end, including retrieval, ranking, and relevance quality across surfaces like search, discovery, home feed, and leaderboards.

You will define metrics, build evaluation tooling, and run online experiments while shaping the ranking stack and maintaining production OpenSearch systems. Strong ownership and leadership are essential.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building production software, with depth in search, ranking, or ML-driven relevance.
• Hands-on production experience with a search engine and large-scale systems.
• Proven ability to measure relevance, run offline evaluations, and justify metrics.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and roadmap for search and recommendations end to end.
• Define quality metrics, build offline evaluation tooling, and run online experiments.
• Design and evolve the ranking stack with live re-ranking and index-time signals.
• Own OpenSearch in production: indexing, mapping, reindexing, and performance.
• Build candidate generation and personalization for discovery surfaces.
• Collaborate with Product and Trust & Safety on surface quality and safety.
• Set engineering standards, instrumentation, and runbooks for safe deployments.
• Mentor engineers and coordinate with backend teams across services.

Skills

Recommender systems

Search architectures

Distributed systems

Go

Ownership mindset

Tools

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch/Lucene

Job description

Cantina Labs is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer to own search and recommendations end to end, including retrieval, ranking, and relevance quality across surfaces like search, discovery, home feed, and leaderboards.

You will define metrics, build evaluation tooling, and run online experiments while shaping the ranking stack and maintaining production OpenSearch systems. Strong ownership and leadership are essential.