Staff Software Engineer, Search Platform

ezCater

Senior technical owner of the Search Platform for ezCater, the leading food tech platform. Designing and implementing search engine architectures while driving relevance and ranking strategy.

Posted 6/9/2026full-timeRemote • Massachusetts • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $184,000 - $232,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AirflowElasticSearchGoKafka

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own the Search Engine architecture: technology direction (Vespa-based), document schema, query serving, and operational model
Own and build the Indexing Pipeline: Temporal-orchestrated workflows that ingest, validate, transform, and write data into the search engine and availability store
Own Availability: zone-based delivery filtering, schedule matching, and the data model that powers it- extracted from the legacy monolith and re-implemented.
Own the Two-Stage Filtering Architecture: zone-based availability filtering followed by Vespa filtering and ranking
Drive search relevance and ranking strategy across ordering contexts and customer types, in collaboration with product and data
Define clear, well-versioned APIs and contracts for how search and availability are consumed across all channels
Manage migration sequencing and risk across the phased rollout (Typeahead, Availability, Core Search)
Build a measurement and experimentation foundation supporting full-funnel evaluation, from CTR through order fulfillment
Lead through collaborative design: white-boarding, technical discussions, and aligning teams around clear architectural decisions
Partner with Platform Engineering on shared service patterns, Temporal, observability, secrets, and CI/CD
Partner with product, data, and downstream consumers on relevance, ranking signals, and API contracts
Act as a technical multiplier through design reviews, code reviews, architectural guidance, and mentorship

Requirements

What you’ll need

8+ years of professional software engineering experience
Deep experience designing, building, and tuning search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch, Vespa, or equivalent); experience leading a major search re-architecture or building from scratch is strongly preferred; Vespa experience is a significant plus
Strong proficiency in Go, or a willingness to adopt it as a primary language
Experience with real-time data pipelines (Kafka, event streaming) for search indexing
Strong instincts for relevance and ranking, with the ability to translate product goals into ranking signals and evaluate them with data
Excellent written and verbal communication around collaborative system design and technical decision-making
A pragmatic, collaborative mindset with strong ownership and systems thinking
Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, or equivalent) is a plus
Familiarity with geospatial systems and spatial filtering is a plus

Benefits

Comp & perks

Health/dental/FSA
401K with ezCater match
Flexible PTO
12 paid holidays
Stock options
Remote-hybrid work from our awesome Boston office OR your home OR a mixture of both home and office
Employee meal program (and many more goodies) when you’re in our office

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

search engine architectureindexing pipelineVespaElasticsearchSolrOpenSearchGoreal-time data pipelinesworkflow orchestrationgeospatial systems

Soft Skills

collaborative designtechnical decision-makingownershipsystems thinkingcommunicationmentorshipcollaborationpragmatic mindsetleadershipevaluation