Senior Staff Software Engineer, Retrieval Systems

Company Description

Etsy is the global marketplace for unique and creative goods. We build, power, and evolve the tools and technologies that connect millions of entrepreneurs with millions of buyers around the world. As an Etsy Inc. employee, whether a team member of Etsy, Reverb, or Depop you will tackle unique, meaningful, and large-scale problems alongside passionate coworkers, all the while making a rewarding impact and Keeping Commerce Human.

Job Description

What's the role?

We are looking for a Senior Staff Engineer to join the Retrieval Systems team to work on information retrieval systems that power Search, Ads and Recommendation for Etsy.

As a Senior Staff Engineer you will play a critical role in defining the technical direction and leading the development of the retrieval platform to power next-gen retrieval at Etsy. You will be responsible for driving innovation, ensuring the scalability and performance of our systems, and working with a team of engineers to deliver high-quality solutions. Do you find joy in building sophisticated distributed systems and optimizing them for high availability and low latency? Do you have passion for systems engineering and enjoy coding in low-level programming languages like Rust, C, C++ etc? Do you enjoy working with an effective and high functioning team that’s passionate about helping buyers on Etsy find the flawless product for them? If so, this could be the ideal match.

This is a full-time position reporting to the Director of Retrieval Platform and the base salary range will be $218,000 - $262,000 USD per year. In addition to salary, you will also be eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus, and our competitive benefits that support you and your family as part of your total rewards package at Etsy. For this role, we are considering candidates based in the United States who are either remote, flex, or office-based. Etsy offers different work modes to meet the variety of needs and preferences of our team. Learn more about our Flex and Office-based work modes and workplace safety policies here.

What's this team like at Etsy?

The Retrieval Systems team works on Etsy’s platform for information retrieval, powering the foundational layers of Search, Ads and Recommendations for our marketplace. We are evolving an inverted index based system for retrieval written in Rust that provides filtering, approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search and lexical retrieval capabilities. We work closely with product teams and platform site reliability engineers to deliver a robust and scalable retrieval engine. Our team values are empathy, kindness, accountability, and autonomy, and we strive to foster an environment where individuals are supported, respected, and empowered to take ownership and collaborate effectively.

What does the day-to-day look like?

• Lead the design and architecture of scalable, performant, and reliable retrieval systems, ensuring the systems meet the current and future retrieval needs of Etsy.
• Hands-on coding and development of critical components and features of retrieval systems, setting a high bar for code quality, performance, and reliability.
• Partner with platform site reliability engineers to optimize the performance of our retrieval systems for high availability, identifying bottlenecks, and implementing improvements to enhance search efficiency and response times.
• Collaborate with product engineering teams to integrate our retrieval services into their workflows and run A/B experiments.
• Mentor and coach engineers, providing technical guidance, career development support, and helping them grow their skills and expertise.
• Of course, this is just a sample of the kinds of work this role will require! You should assume that your role will encompass other tasks, too, and that your job duties and responsibilities may change from time to time at Etsy's discretion, or otherwise applicable with local law.

Qualifications

Qualities that will help you thrive in this role are:

• You have successful track record of building scalable and performant distributed systems
• You have focused interest in or experience with information retrieval technologies like inverted indexes, ANN (vector databases), ingest pipelines and indexing/serving layers
• You have experience with low level programming languages like Rust, C, C++ etc
• You can successfully set the technical vision and direction and lead a team to imp