Staff Software Engineer, Search Platform

DoorDash DoorDash · Consumer · San Francisco, CA · 341 Executive Engineering

DoorDash is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Search Platform team. This role focuses on building and scaling a reliable, fast, and efficient search platform that powers millions of merchants and items. Responsibilities include designing and evolving distributed systems for indexing, ranking, query planning, and serving, improving developer velocity, and collaborating with AI and Product teams. The ideal candidate has extensive experience in large-scale low-latency distributed systems, Information Retrieval, and technical leadership.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead the vision - Help define the technical direction, contribute to the long-term technical roadmap, and support strategic initiatives in the search platform.
  2. Build for scale, reliability, and efficiency - Lead design and implementation of critical components to evolve the platform to ensure scalable, efficient, low-latency search and retrieval across a large corpus of data.
  3. Improve developer velocity - Drive innovations that reduce time-to-production.
  4. Deliver and inspire high-quality work - Deliver production-ready code and services end-to-end, including performance tuning, and raise the quality bar through code and design reviews.
  5. Collaborate across the Company - Work closely with the Infrastructure, Product, and AI teams across the company to tailor the platform for their specific needs while maintaining a core set of robust, reusable components.

Skills

Required

  • B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent
  • 8+ years of industry experience
  • Passion for reliability & performance
  • built and operated large-scale low-latency distributed systems with high availability
  • understand cost vs. performance trade-offs
  • Strong knowledge of CS fundamentals
  • system design
  • experience with programming languages like Java, C++
  • Track record of technical leadership
  • collaboration
  • driving high-impact, technically complex projects end-to-end in fast-paced environments
  • mentoring other engineers
  • Demonstrated expertise in Information Retrieval
  • query serving
  • indexing
  • ranking

What the JD emphasized

  • large-scale low-latency distributed systems
  • high availability
  • cost vs. performance trade-offs
  • Information Retrieval
  • query serving
  • indexing
  • ranking