Senior Staff Software Engineer - Real-Time Search & Recs

Cantina Labs; United States; On-site; USD 250,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary + equity

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

42 days of paid time off including 15;

15 PTO days

10 sick days

15 company holidays

2 floating holidays

Parental leave & fertility support

401(k) retirement savings plan

Lifestyle spending account – $500/mo

Complimentary lunch and snacks

One Medical membership

Job summary

You will work closely with Product and Trust & Safety to define what "good" means, design metrics and evaluation, and scale the ranking stack with robust instrumentation and safe rollouts.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building production software with search/recommendation experience.
• Hands-on production search engine experience: OpenSearch/Elasticsearch/Lucene/Vespa.
• Experience with offline evaluation, golden sets, and A/B testing.
• Experience with Go or similar systems language.
• Strong distributed systems and backend fundamentals.
• Ownership of ambiguous areas and ability to ship results.
• Clear written communication and tradeoff judgment.
• Experience with AI-generated or rapidly growing catalogs preferred.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and roadmap for search and recommendations end-to-end.
• Define quality metrics per surface and run online experiments.
• Design and evolve the ranking stack with signals and re-ranking.
• Own OpenSearch in production including index design and reindexing safety.
• Build candidate generation and feature pipelines for surfaces.
• Collaborate with Product and Trust & Safety on what 'good' means.
• Set engineering standards with instrumentation and safe rollouts.
• Act as technical contact for discovery across backend teams.

Skills

Search and recommendations

Go or systems language

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

Offline evaluation

Distributed systems

Candidate generation

Feature pipelines

Re-ranking

Communication

Tools

OpenSearch

Elasticsearch

Lucene

Vespa

Go

SQL

Kafka

Job description

You will work closely with Product and Trust & Safety to define what "good" means, design metrics and evaluation, and scale the ranking stack with robust instrumentation and safe rollouts.