Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search & Recommendation

Location and employment

• Remote role available in the U.S. or Canada.
• Employment type is full time.

About Cantina

Role overview

What you'll do

• Own search and recommendation architecture across search, discovery, home feed, trending, and creator leaderboards.
• Measure relevance using surface-specific metrics, offline evaluation, golden sets, and online experiments.
• Evolve ranking pipelines, freshness models, search infrastructure, candidate generation, and personalization.
• Partner with Product, Trust & Safety, data, and ML teams on quality, cold start, safeguards, features, and models.
• Set engineering standards for instrumentation, safe rollouts, and runbooks; mentor engineers and coordinate across backend teams.

What you'll bring

• 10+ years building production software, with substantial search, ranking, recommendation, or ML-driven relevance experience on a consumer-scale product.
• Hands-on production search-engine expertise, including index and analyzer design, relevance tuning, and cluster operations.
• Experience with relevance evaluation, golden sets, and A/B or interleaving experiments.
• Recommender-system fluency across candidate generation, feature pipelines, embedding retrieval, and reranking.
• Strong distributed systems and backend fundamentals; production Go or a comparable systems language, plus data-layer experience.
• Demonstrated ownership of ambiguous work, clear written communication, and judgment on relevance, freshness, safety, and latency tradeoffs.
• AI-generated or fast-growing content catalogs, severe cold starts, or trust-and-safety ranking experience is preferred.

Compensation

• Anticipated annual base salary is USD $250,000 to $320,000; compensation considers skills, experience, scope, location, and market data.

Benefits

• Benefits include company equity, medical, dental, and vision insurance with 99.99% of premiums covered.
• Paid time off includes 15 PTO days, 10 sick days, 15 company holidays, and 2 floating holidays.
• The source also mentions generous parental leave.