Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search & Recommendation

Cantina Labs is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer to own search and recommendations end-to-end, including retrieval, ranking, relevance quality, and roadmap. This role involves architecture, metrics, OpenSearch, candidate generation, and working with Product and Trust & Safety. The ideal candidate has 10+ years experience in search, ranking, or ML-driven relevance.

10+ years building production software with depth in search, ranking, recommendations, or ML-driven relevance. Hands-on expertise with production search engines (OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, etc.). Rigorous approach to relevance measurement. Fluency across recommender stack. Strong distributed systems and backend fundamentals with Go. Demonstrated ownership of ambiguous areas. Clear communication. Preferred: experience with AI-generated content catalogs.