Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

GoDaddy, a company on a mission to empower small businesses. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead the technical strategy and architectural decisions for our search infrastructure, driving the evolution of our platform into an intelligent, personalized search experience. You will engineer highly scalable backend services, write high-quality production code, and mentor other engineers.

Build intelligent search experiences by developing relevance, personalization, and recommendation capabilities that leverage customer intent, behavioral signals, machine learning models.

About GoDaddy

Architect and evolve large-scale search infrastructure that powers domain discovery for millions of customers, designing distributed indexing, retrieval, ranking, and recommendation systems.

We encourage you to apply even if your experience or skillset doesn’t align perfectly with every requirement. We value a wide range of backgrounds and transferable skills, and we are excited to support learning and growth

Responsibilities

• Lead technical strategy and architectural decisions across search services, APIs, data platforms, and cloud-native systems, influencing engineering direction across multiple teams and products.

Requirements

• This role requires 8+ years of experience in building and operating large-scale distributed software systems, deep experience with cloud-native development, and advanced proficiency in Java, Go, C#, or similar programming languages.
• 8+ years building and operating large-scale distributed software systems in production environments
• Deep experience with cloud-native development, microservices, APIs, and AWS-based infrastructure
• Advanced proficiency in Java, Go, C#, or similar object-oriented programming languages
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical strategy and architecture across multiple teams
• Expert knowledge of search technologies, information retrieval, ranking systems, recommendation platforms, or related domains
• Strong software engineering fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, system design, and software architecture
• Experience with Kafka, Spark, Flink, or large-scale real-time and batch data processing platforms

Preferred

• Experience integrating machine learning models into customer-facing production systems
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience utilizing AI-powered engineering tools to improve software development and delivery
• Experience building recommendation systems, personalization platforms, or ML-powered customer experiences
• Experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Lucene, Vespa, or similar search technologies
• Knowledge of semantic search, vector databases, embeddings, LLM-powered retrieval, or agentic AI systems

Pay

USD 140,000 - 273,000