Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search & Recommendation

🕒 September 28

🌐 United States, Canada – Remote

🇺🇸 United States – Remote 🇨🇦 Canada – Remote

💵 $250k - $320k / year

⏰ Full Time

🟠 Senior

🧑‍💻 Full-stack Engineer

🦅 H1B Visa Sponsor

This company has sponsored H1B visas in the past.

👻 Ghost score 10%

What it means: the chance that no one is really hiring for this job.How to read it: 60% or higher means we think this is a ghost. Lower scores are less of a worry.Why this score:

• Open for 45 days.
• Jobs at this company usually fill in 28 days.

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Cantina

WebsiteLinkedInAll Job Openings

51 - 200 employees

Founded founded by Sean Parker

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

🎮 Gaming

🌍 Social Impact

Artificial Intelligence • Gaming • Social Impact

Cantina is a company that specializes in creating advanced AI characters that can talk, feel, and capture their adventures with selfies. It offers a platform where users can unleash their AI bots in online communities, allowing these lifelike, social creatures to interact with humans. Cantina focuses on building networks of AI influencers and encourages users to explore and build their own collections of AI bots. The company's mission is to foster an interactive universe, inviting creativity and social interaction through digital personalities and AI technology.

📋 Description

• Own the architecture and roadmap for search and recommendations, including query understanding, retrieval, ranking, search, discovery, home feed, trending, and creator leaderboards • Define quality metrics per surface, build offline evaluation and golden-set tooling, and run online experiments • Design and evolve ranking systems, including engagement signal pipelines, decay and freshness models, and index-time/live query-time signal combination • Own OpenSearch in production, including index and mapping design, reindex and cutover safety, query performance, cost, and cluster capacity • Build candidate generation and personalization for recommendation surfaces and partner with data and ML on feature pipelines and models • Collaborate with Product and Trust & Safety on quality gates, cold-start behavior, and recommendation safety • Establish instrumentation, flag-gated rollouts, and runbooks • Serve as technical point of contact for discovery across backend teams and mentor engineers

🎯 Requirements

• 10+ years building production software, with substantial depth in search, ranking, recommendations, or ML-driven relevance on a consumer-scale product • Hands-on expertise with a production search engine such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Lucene, Vespa, or similar, including index and analyzer design, relevance tuning, and cluster operations • Experience owning offline evaluation, golden sets, and A/B or interleaving frameworks • Fluency across candidate generation, feature pipelines, embedding retrieval, and re-ranking • Strong distributed systems and backend fundamentals • Production experience in Go or a comparable systems language • Comfort with SQL warehouses and streaming and batch pipelines • Demonstrated ownership of an ambiguous area with measurable results • Clear written communication and judgment regarding relevance, freshness, safety, and latency tradeoffs • Preferred: experience with AI-generated or rapidly growing content catalogs, severe cold-start conditions, or ranking under trust-and-safety constraints

🏖️ Benefits

• Generous company equity • Medical, dental, and vision insurance – 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina • 42 days of paid time off, including 15 PTO days, 10 sick days, 15 company holidays, and 2 floating holidays • Generous parental leave & fertility support • 401(k) retirement savings plan • Lifestyle spending account – $500/month to use however you’d like • Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees • One Medical membership

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