Senior Software Engineer, Real-Time Search & Recs (Hybrid)

Wayfair; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Wayfair is seeking a Software Engineer III for a hybrid role based in Mountain View, CA. You will design, build, and scale real-time ML-driven search and recommendations infrastructure, balancing hands-on development with mentorship.

The position emphasizes ownership of distributed systems and collaboration with product, ML, and principal engineers to deliver intelligent solutions. You will lead the engineering roadmap, champion best practices for CI/CD and observability, and contribute to a

Qualifications

• 5–8 years of professional software development experience in senior/lead role.
• Distributed systems experience in production environments.
• Expert-level Java (Spring Boot) and/or Python.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform, containers, and CI/CD pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and scale high-throughput microservices and data pipelines for real-time ML-driven decisions.
• Mentor engineers, drive engineering excellence, and enforce code quality and observability practices.
• Collaborate with Product, ML Scientists, Data Scientists, and Principal Engineers to shape technical roadmap and deliver integrated solutions.
• Own production systems, improve resilience, cost-optimization, and monitoring; address technical debt proactively.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies within the GCP ecosystem to keep the search/recommendation engine cutting edge.

Skills

Java (Spring Boot)

Python

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms (GCP)

Docker/Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

SQL/NoSQL

Kafka/Spark

Observability

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE

Job description

Wayfair is seeking a Software Engineer III for a hybrid role based in Mountain View, CA. You will design, build, and scale real-time ML-driven search and recommendations infrastructure, balancing hands-on development with mentorship.

The position emphasizes ownership of distributed systems and collaboration with product, ML, and principal engineers to deliver intelligent solutions. You will lead the engineering roadmap, champion best practices for CI/CD and observability, and contribute to a