Software Engineer II - Engineer
The Software Engineer II role at Confidential Client focuses on building and enhancing large-scale backend systems that power AI-driven search experiences across Uber Eats, Grocery, and Retail. The engineer will develop scalable, low-latency services for search retrieval, ranking, and query understanding, collaborating closely with cross-functional teams to integrate machine learning and LLM technologies, improve system performance, and ensure reliability in production environments.
About Careertakes
👉 Important disclosure: Careertakes is a third-party recruiting platform supporting this hiring process. If selected, you will be employed directly by our client, Internet Marketplace Platforms.
Applicants for this role may also receive access to additional matched opportunities through the Careertakes platform.
What You’ll Do
Confidential Client is hiring a Software Engineer II to help design, build, and operate large-scale, low-latency search systems and emerging LLM-powered search experiences. You will work across retrieval, ranking, query understanding, and model-serving infrastructure to improve relevance, throughput, and reliability for consumer-facing products.
- Build and maintain scalable backend services powering search across large catalogs (restaurants, stores, items).
- Develop retrieval and ranking pipelines (lexical and semantic) to surface relevant results in real time.
- Productionize ML- and LLM-powered search capabilities including query understanding, embeddings, and reranking.
- Integrate machine-learned models and model-serving features (batching, caching, streaming) into production serving paths.
- Design and operate search serving and indexing infrastructure to handle high query volumes.
- Improve system latency, throughput, and reliability through performance optimization and observability.
- Debug production issues, analyze search relevance and performance metrics, and drive improvements.
- Participate in design and code reviews; write clean, well-tested, maintainable production code.
- Collaborate with Product, Data Science, ML, and other engineering teams to ship customer-facing improvements.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 2+ years of professional software engineering experience delivering production systems.
- Proficiency in at least one of: Go, Java, C++, or Python.
- Experience developing backend services, APIs, or distributed systems.
- Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and system design.
- Experience writing maintainable, well-tested production code.
- Strong problem-solving skills and effective collaboration across cross-functional teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building scalable, high-throughput, low-latency backend systems.
- Familiarity with search, information retrieval, recommendation, or ranking systems.
- Experience with embeddings, semantic retrieval, approximate nearest-neighbor (ANN) or vector search.
- Hands-on experience with LLMs, generative AI, or ML model-serving systems.
- Familiarity with search technologies such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Vespa, or Lucene.
- Experience with distributed systems tools like Kafka, Redis, Cassandra, Spark, or Flink.
- Strong background in performance optimization, monitoring, observability, and production debugging.
- Experience shipping consumer-facing products at scale.
Compensation & Benefits
For San Francisco, CA-based roles: the base salary range for this role is USD $171,000 per year - USD $190,000 per year. This posting complies with California pay-transparency requirements.
- Eligible for bonus program and may be offered equity awards and other compensation.
- All full-time employees are eligible to participate in a 401(k) plan and a comprehensive benefits package.
- Confidential Client offers a range of benefits; details will be provided during the hiring process.
Location & Work Model
- Location: San Francisco, CA (onsite expectation).
- Offices remain key to collaboration. Unless approved for full remote work, employees must spend at least 50% of their time in-office. Specific on-site requirements will be shared by Recruiter.
Why Join
This team combines distributed systems, information retrieval, machine learning, and LLMs to solve real-world problems at large scale. If you're energized by designing infrastructure that serves millions of users and applying ML/LLM techniques to improve relevance and latency, you'll have significant impact.
Equal Opportunity & Hiring Transparency
Careertakes and our client are Equal Opportunity Employers committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce. We prohibit discrimination or harassment of any kind. To support a fair and efficient hiring process, AI tools may be used to assist with application review or resume screening. These tools do not replace human decision-making. Final hiring decisions are made by people.
If you have questions about how your data is used, please contact us directly.
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