Staff Software Engineer, Search

What the Role Is We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer who’ll be the technical lead for a new Search team at Babylist. This new team will be focused on moving Babylist’s search capability in-house, making our search results more relevant and personalized, and partnering with other teams to transform search in the product from functional to delightful. Registry building is the heart of the Babylist product. Every parent builds a list of dozens of products, from swaddle to stroller, with real stakes (a friend or family member is going to buy these things, and a baby is going to use them). As a universal registry, this registry also typically spans many retailers. This makes registry building on Babylist one of the most interesting search and personalization problems in consumer e-commerce. This is zero-to-one work, with big ambitions. You’d build a search capability from the ground up, with a clear mandate from leadership to do it. In your first year, we expect to have rebuilt search to be highly relevant and personalized, and delivered big bets like universal search: one experience across items we sell and items from other retailers, and across products, guides and registries. We also want to work with Addie, our AI registry assistant, to have LLMs play a role in the search experience. If you want to tune an established search system, this isn’t the right role. If you’ve worked inside a strong search team and want to build a new system from scratch at a company earlier in that journey, read on. What You'll Own A Staff Engineer at Babylist sets direction. You’ll be the technical lead for search: you decide where it goes over the next year or two, sequence the bets that get there, and make the technical and product calls along the way. You’re still in the code and will drive initiatives forward across multiple teams. You’ll have software engineering and machine learning engineering support on the team. A few examples of initiatives you’d drive on the Search team: • Build search in-house. Choose the architecture for indexing, retrieval and serving, and plan a seamless migration. The system you design replaces what we use today and is the foundation for everything below. • Define what a good result is. Decide how we measure result quality, then improve it through query understanding, ranking and the behavioral signals we collect. • Unify search across everything we show. One experience across items we sell and items from other retailers, and across products, guides and registries, including how to rank items we don’t sell next to ones we do. • Decide how search and recommendations fit together. Bring what we know about a user and their registry into results, and decide how much retrieval and ranking search shares with our recommendation models. • Make search conversational. Work with the Addie team, our AI registry assistant, on queries like “best stroller for urban family,” where the shopper describes a need instead of naming a product. Like every Staff Engineer here, you will: • Take a fuzzy business problem from the first sketch through to production, and stay on the hook for whether it actually helped customers. • Build the platform or tooling other teams adopt by choice, and own it as it scales. • Set the standard for how search builds with AI. Decide what good looks like, build the patterns and evals that get agents there and catch the output that's confidently wrong before it ships. • Partner with product, design and data as a peer, shaping what's worth building from the start. • Coach Senior engineers through the hard calls, the ambiguous ones as much as the technical ones Who You Are You meet the Staff bar at Babylist. You’ve shipped production systems for enough years to have earned strong opinions, and y