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The Role Lead the technical direction for Babylist's new search team, building an in-house search platform from scratch. Own indexing, retrieval, ranking, query understanding, personalization, relevance measurement, conversational search, and integration with recommendations and AI. Drive architecture, product decisions, cross-team initiatives, production delivery, platform adoption, and search quality improvements while coaching senior engineers and partnering with product, design, and data. Summary Generated by Built In What the Role Is We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer who'll be the technical lead for a new Search team at Babylist. This new team will be focused on moving Babylist's search capability in-house, making our search results more relevant and personalized, and partnering with other teams to transform search in the product from functional to delightful. Registry building is the heart of the Babylist product. Every parent builds a list of dozens of products, from swaddle to stroller, with real stakes (a friend or family member is going to buy these things, and a baby is going to use them). As a universal registry, this registry also typically spans many retailers. This makes registry building on Babylist one of the most interesting search and personalization problems in consumer e-commerce. This is zero-to-one work, with big ambitions. You'd build a search capability from the ground up, with a clear mandate from leadership to do it. In your first year, we expect to have rebuilt search to be highly relevant and personalized, and delivered big bets like universal search: one experience across items we sell and items from other retailers, and across products, guides and registries. We also want to work with Addie, our AI registry assistant, to have LLMs play a role in the search experience. If you want to tune an established search system, this isn't the right role. If you've worked inside a strong search team and want to build a new system from scratch at a company earlier in that journey, read on. What You'll Own A Staff Engineer at Babylist sets direction. You'll be the technical lead for search: you decide where it goes over the next year or two, sequence the bets that get there, and make the technical and product calls along the way. You're still in the code and will drive initiatives forward across multiple teams. You'll have software engineering and machine learning engineering support on the team. A few examples of initiatives you'd drive on the Search team: Build search in-house. Choose the architecture for indexing, retrieval and serving, and plan a seamless migration. The system you design replaces what we use today and is the foundation for everything below. Define what a good result is. Decide how we measure result quality, then improve it through query understanding, ranking and the behavioral signals we collect. Unify search across everything we show. One experience across items we sell and items from other retailers, and across products, guides and registries, including how to rank items we don't sell next to ones we do. Decide how search and recommendations fit together. Bring what we know about a user and their registry into results, and decide how much retrieval and ranking search shares with our recommendation models. Make search conversational. Work with the Addie team, our AI registry assistant, on queries like "best stroller for urban family," where the shopper describes a need instead of naming a product. Like every Staff Engineer here, you will: Take a fuzzy business problem from the first sketch through to production, and stay on the hook for whether it actually helped customers. Build the platform or tooling other teams adopt by choice, and own it as it scales. Set the standard for how search builds with AI. Decide what good looks like, build the patterns and evals that get agents there and catch the output that's confidently wrong before it ships. Partner with product, design and data as a peer, shaping what's worth building from the start. Coach Senior engineers through the hard calls, the ambiguous ones as much as the technical ones Who You Are 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. Compensation We post real numbers. For a US-based Staff Engineer, the starting base salary range is $233,500 to $290,700, plus a target annual bonus of 20 percent of base. That's total target cash of roughly $280,200 to $348,840. On top of that you get meaningful equity and a 401(k) match. Where you start in that range depends on your experience, and your pay grows from there with performance and scope. How We Build AI is the default here. Engineers run agentic sessions for most of the work, and a lot of the interesting engineering now lives in the scaffolding that makes the agents good: the eval harnesses, the curated context, custom review skills and fast CI. Agents also triage incidents and handle a big share of support. A human always owns the outcome.

The architecture is intentionally simple:

one Rails monolith, MySQL and few moving parts. That's deliberate. Simple infrastructure lets us move fast and lets AI reason about the whole system, so the hardest problems are the ones in front of customers.

The Stack Core app:

Rails, Packwerk, React, TypeScript, Sidekiq Mobile:

iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin) Data, search & events: MySQL, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Weaviate, WarpStream, Hex, Sigma Machine learning: deep learning, matrix factorization, retrieval & ranking, AWS SageMaker, MLflow AI & dev tooling: Claude Code, Devin, Linear, CodeRabbit, Warden, LangChain, Bedrock AgentCore, Maxim Infra & ops: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog, incident.io, LaunchDarkly Key integrations: Shopify (payments), Iterable (CRM) Why Babylist An engineer, expecting her first baby, couldn't find the registry she wanted. So she built it. That's how Babylist started, and it's still how we work: engineers solving problems for families. Becoming a parent is one of the biggest moments in a person's life. Millions reach it for the first time every year, making thousands of decisions and figuring it out as they go. That's who we build for, and we're a long way from done. Ten million people give gifts through Babylist every year. We did more than $750M in revenue in 2025, up 45 percent over the year before, and we've been profitable for eight years while staying independent. So you can take on a hard, multi-year problem without watching over your shoulder for the next round or the next correction. And the team is small, around 65 engineers, so what you ship stays visible and your scope stays wide. How We Work Remote-first across the US and Canada, and we have been for years. That's not changing. We trust you to own your time and your outcomes, and we get everyone in a room together twice a year. Teams are small, pods of three to five engineers, so nothing you ship disappears into a committee. You'll work shoulder to shoulder with product, design and data, and with the partners across the business who rely on what you ship. You'll also stay close to customers yourself: sitting in on user interviews, watching session recordings, riding along with support. Here that's part of the engineering job, on a regular basis. How We Hire Three rounds, usually two to three weeks start to finish. Recruiter conversation (30 minutes).

Trade context:

what you want next, what we're building and straight answers on comp, team and remote. Technical screen (1 hour). One round, no AI, language-agnostic. Reach for Google when you normally would. We just want to see how you reason from first principles. Final round (4 hours).

Four one-hour interviews:

system design, AI-assisted coding with the tools you'd actually use here, product sense and culture and values. You'll hear back either way within 24 to 48 hours. Benefits Company-paid medical and fully covered dental and vision A 401(k) match Generous paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents, plus a gradual return-to-work program Winter Wonder Week, a paid company-wide week off at the end of the year A remote-work stipend Mental-health and wellness support A Few Things to Know We record and transcribe interviews to evaluate candidates, in line with applicable privacy laws. We expect you to use AI in your work and we welcome it in the process, but what you submit and say should reflect your own thinking. If you have a family member or close relationship with a Babylist employee, let your recruiter know. Official outreach only ever comes from an @babylist.com address Read Full Description Skills Required Production experience building and operating search systems, including indexing, retrieval, ranking, and query understanding Experience keeping search services fast, relevant, and reliable as traffic and catalog size grow Experience evaluating search quality through offline and online methods, relevance judgments, and A/B tests Ability to use query data, user behavior, and result-quality judgment to guide product and search decisions Ability to connect search changes to customer behavior, conversion, or revenue outcomes Experience defining ambiguous problems, designing systems from scratch, and owning outcomes end to end Staff-level software engineering experience leading technical direction and cross-team initiatives Experience building search systems in an e-commerce setting Experience shaping how a team builds with AI What the Team is Saying Victoria McCulloh Manager, Showroom Operations My favorite thing about working at Babylist is the truly authentic group of people that I've had the honor of working with over the past few years. I have been able to be myself and try new things. I feel like what I do really makes a difference. Victoria McCulloh Manager, Showroom Operations My favorite thing about working at Babylist is the truly authentic group of people that I've had the honor of working with over the past few years. I have been able to be myself and try new things. I feel like what I do really makes a difference. Becky Lehman Senior Manager, Employee Engagement We stay connected to each other through Slack, virtual events, or meeting up in person. It is essential as a remote company that we are intentional about seeing each other in person and use that time to build strong relationships. We have an annual company off-site and department off-sites that focus on connecting with each other as whole humans. Andy Aragon Sr. Software Engineer, Commerce Effective asynchronous communication is the key to working remotely. Being able to provide generous, carefully-considered updates with just enough detail to ensure your reader understands your reasoning is a powerful skill that I see on display every day. TJ Moretto CTO Our implementation teams have full responsibility for delivering their projects. We provide them with a well-defined problem statement and a workable solution outline. Then, it's up to the team to work out the details of the project, set tasks, adjust the scope, and get creative to deliver in a fixed period of time. Liz Primm VP Strategic Partnerships & Business Development I'm excited to integrate our partner brands into the metaverse with the launch of Babylist Land, a virtual registry and gifting experience. Gen Z and Millenial parents want to buy in virtual environments, and Babylist Land will integrate our brand partners in this experience to drive high engagement and ultimately, registry additions and sales. Katie Pennachio Software Engineer I love working as an engineer at Babylist where the leadership team is available, approachable, and makes improvements based on our feedback. I feel supported both at work and in life. Babylist Compensation & Benefits Highlights Healthcare Strength — Health coverage is advertised as 100% employer‑paid for full‑time employees, with mental‑health services and gender‑affirming care included. Feedback suggests employee‑only premiums are fully covered on specific plans, adding meaningful financial value. Parental & Family Support — Parental leave is described as up to 24 weeks, with fully paid time for both birthing and non‑birthing parents, alongside fertility coverage and a $5,000 reproductive‑care stipend. Feedback suggests family‑building, adoption, and parenting support are emphasized and materially useful. Leave & Time Off Breadth — The package includes nine wellness days, ten paid holidays, vacation time, and a paid Winter Wonder Week closure. Feedback suggests this structure provides predictable time away beyond standard PTO. Learn more about Babylist's Compensation & Benefits → Babylist Insights What's It Like to Work at Babylist? Babylist Culture & Values Babylist Career Growth & Development What's the Work-Life Balance Like at Babylist? Babylist Leadership & Management Babylist Company Growth, Stability & Outlook View all jobs at Babylist View Babylist Profile Report Job