office-hours - Senior Software Engineer, Search & Discovery

San Francisco, NYC, or Fully Remote - Hybrid$170k - $220k+ Equity1mo ago

Requirements

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with strong backend fundamentals and comfort working across the stack • Pride in your craft and a track record of shipping high-quality products and features at scale • Experience with search, discovery, recommendations, or data-intensive systems, and enough knowledge of relevance and ranking to make an immediate impact • The ability to turn ambiguous user and business problems into clean, scalable, well-tested engineering solutions • A self-starter mindset, with the desire to own a domain end to end and grow into deeper ownership of it over time • Back end: Node.js, TypeScript, MongoDB, OpenAPI, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch • Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Kibana, Sentry • Workflow: GitHub, Slack, Notion, Figma, Amplitude, Storybook • Front end (not required for this role): React, Next.js, Tailwind • Deep experience with search relevance and ranking, including precision/recall tradeoffs, retrieval, and reranking • Experience building recommendation systems or personalization at scale • Familiarity with vector or semantic search (embeddings, HNSW/IVF, hybrid retrieval) • Experience with knowledge graphs or entity resolution • You've integrated LLMs into search or discovery workflows in production • Experience with data-intensive, event-driven, or asynchronous processing systems

Responsibilities

• Own search, discovery, and recommendations end to end, from the underlying data and indices to relevance, ranking, and the user-facing experience • Build and improve the backend services and APIs that power matching across our knowledge graph, with a focus on precision, recall, and performance • Turn fragmented, unstructured data into structured, searchable knowledge through reliable ingestion and indexing pipelines • Ship user-facing search and discovery features across the stack, partnering closely with product and design • Raise the bar on architecture, code quality, and observability as you scale this part of the platform • Explore AI and LLM-assisted approaches to discovery (retrieval, embeddings, ranking, agentic workflows) and bring the promising ones to production

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage • Monthly wellness and fitness stipend • Paid time off policy, along with company holidays • Annual company off-sites (Tahoe, Mendocino, Mexico City, San Diego, Park City) • Parent-friendly policies, remote flexibility, and paid family leave • Pay Transparency Notice • Full-time offers include base salary, equity, and benefits. • This role is San Francisco-based preferred (2-3 days per week in office), and open to fully remote for the right candidate. • Don't meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that some candidates, especially underrepresented groups such as women and people of color, are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Office Hours we believe in building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you're excited about this role but don't meet every qualification in the job description, we still encourage you to apply. You could still be the right candidate for this or other roles at Office Hours!