Babylist Staff Software Engineer, Search at Babylist leading the technical development of a new in-house search team. Responsible for building and improving search relevance and personalization.
Responsibilities
Set technical direction and lead search initiatives
Build search architecture for indexing, retrieval, and serving
Define and improve search result quality through query understanding and ranking
Unify search experience across multiple product types and retailers
Integrate search with recommendation models
Collaborate with AI registry assistant team to enable conversational search
Qualification
You meet the Staff bar at BabylistOn top of thatHands-on search experienceExperience evaluating search qualityA focus on the userComfort building from zeroYou measure yourself by impact
Required
You meet the Staff bar at Babylist. You’ve shipped production systems for enough years to have earned strong opinions, and you hold them loosely. You can pick up an ambiguous problem and start moving before anyone hands you the full picture. You’ve already changed how a team builds with AI, and the new way stuck.
On top of that, you’ve worked on search problems before, ideally in an e-commerce setting. This role needs depth in the systems behind search and a clear focus on the people using it. You bring:
Hands-on search experience: building and running search in production, including indexing, retrieval, ranking and query understanding. You know how to keep a search service fast, relevant and reliable as traffic and catalog size grow.
Experience evaluating search quality: offline and online, including relevance judgments and A/B tests.
A focus on the user: you use query data, behavior and judgment about result quality to decide what to build, and you can connect a search change to what shoppers do, and to conversion or revenue.
Comfort building from zero: you can define the problem, design the system and own it end to end.
You measure yourself by impact: a customer outcome, or a system a dozen teams come to depend on.
