Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search

Doordashusa; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 231,200 - 340,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan with employer matching

16 weeks of paid parental leave

Wellness benefits

Comprehensive medical, dental and vision benefits

Paid time off and paid sick leave

Job summary

Doordashusa in San Francisco is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to lead the technical strategy and architectural direction for its search platform. This role will be pivotal in driving advancements to handle massive scale and complexity.

As a strategic influencer, you will guide the architecture of the next generation of search infrastructure, working with machine learning, product, and infrastructure teams. Strong leadership and deep technical expertise are key to elevating the engineering culture.

Your role comes with a competitive compensation package, comprehensive benefits, and a commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of industry experience, particularly in leading large-scale projects.
• Proven ability to manage multi-quarter technical roadmaps.
• Strong expertise in search infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical strategy for the search organization.
• Architect next-generation search stack.
• Drive cross-functional team alignment.

Skills

Leadership in technical direction

Distributed systems expertise

Machine Learning systems knowledge

AI coding tools proficiency

Education

B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science

Job description

About the Team

We are on a mission to build a reliable, fast, and scalable search for DoorDash. As a product, we help millions of customers find the stores, items, and experiences they want. As a platform, we provide indexing, retrieval, ranking, and query understanding capabilities to internal customer teams across more than 20 verticals. Our work spans three dimensions: scale (over a billion indexed documents, thousands of QPS, expensive operations on millions of documents per second), product (improving search experience for DoorDash customers and enabling product teams across many surfaces to experiment with minimal friction using search infrastructure), and quality (query understanding, multi-stage ranking, and semantic search capabilities to improve search relevance and drive conversion).

This is a pivotal moment for Search. We are evolving the platform to support the next generation of consumer experiences, from semantic search to agentic commerce experiences powered by LLM. The architectural decisions we make now will define how DoorDash discovery works for the next decade.

About the Role

As a Senior Staff Engineer on Search, you will serve as the tech lead for the Search organization, driving the technical strategy and architectural direction for the entire search stack. You will own the multi-year technical roadmap spanning indexing, serving, and the backend systems that power search and agentic commerce experiences at DoorDash. This is an individual contributor role with org-wide technical authority.

You will partner closely with Machine Learning, Product, and Infrastructure stakeholders to chart the roadmap, scale foundational systems, and deliver high-impact outcomes that improve discovery, conversion, and customer experience.

You're excited about this opportunity because you will…

• Lead at scale: Serve as the uber tech lead for Search, providing technical vision and architectural direction across the entire organization. Own a multi-year roadmap that spans multiple services and teams powering mission-critical products at DoorDash.
• Architect the next-generation search stack: Drive the rebuild of core search infrastructure, including indexing pipelines, embedding-based retrieval, and ML ranker serving in latency-sensitive paths. This stack will power both consumer search and agentic commerce experiences at DoorDash scale.
• Influence across teams: Drive alignment across ML, Infrastructure, Product, and partner engineering teams. Mentor staff and senior engineers across the search org to raise the bar of technical excellence.
• Shape engineering culture: Set the technical bar for how the search org designs, ships, and operates large-scale systems, and define the patterns that will outlast any single project.
• Hands‑on problem solving: Dig into complex distributed systems challenges, from low-latency serving to indexing freshness tradeoffs, and write code that moves the needle.

We're excited about you because you have…

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent.
• 10+ years of industry experience, with a track record of leading large-scale, high-impact components and systems.
• Proficiency in using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) in the full software development lifecycle, including designing, generating code, testing, monitoring and releasing software
• Proven ability to drive multi-quarter technical roadmaps as a technical lead, with clear ownership of architectural decisions.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and data pipelines at scale. Expertise in search infrastructure, including indexing and serving stack.
• Strong understanding of ML systems, embedding-based retrieval, model serving tradeoffs, and multi-stage ranking architectures.
• Strong technical intuition paired with the ability to influence and align cross-functional stakeholders.
• Humility and growth mindset, leading through expertise and collaboration, not hierarchy.

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 here.

• 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).

National base pay range for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado.

$231,200 - $340,000 USD

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.