Software Engineer, Search Platform; Remote

ez Cater is the #1 food tech platform for workplaces in the US. The company makes it easy for any organization to manage its food needs and order from over 125,000 restaurants nationwide. For workplaces, ez Cater provides flexible and scalable solutions for everything from employee meal programs to one‑off meetings, all backed by beyond helpful 24/7 service and business‑grade reliability.

For restaurant partners, ez Cater helps grow their business by bringing them new high‑value customers and large orders.

ez Cater is investing in a next‑generation, composable platform that powers future product experiences across the organization. This platform is API‑first, headless, and designed to model durable business capabilities spanning restaurants, customers, and internal operations.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Search team, you will be the senior technical owner of the Search Platform: the Search Engine, the Indexing Pipeline that feeds it, and Availability, which determines which restaurants can fulfill an order. You will set technical direction, lead the design and implementation of the indexing pipeline and query‑serving stack, and shape ranking and relevance strategy.

This is a hands‑on technical leadership role. You will build parts of the platform, guide the team’s execution, and partner with Platform Engineering and downstream consumers at the integration boundaries.

Search is the front door of the marketplace. Every customer interaction (browse, search, filter) passes through the systems this role owns, and every order depends on Availability correctly identifying which restaurants can deliver. The quality of the search architecture, the freshness of the index, and the accuracy of delivery eligibility directly drive order volume, customer satisfaction, and the platform’s long‑term competitive position.

This is a rare opportunity to lead a search platform build at a company with significant scale and a rich problem domain.

• Own the Search Engine architecture: technology direction (Vespa‑based), document schema, query serving, and operational model
• Own and build the Indexing Pipeline:
  Temporal‑orchestrated workflows that ingest, validate, transform, and write data into the search engine and availability store
• Own Availability: zone‑based delivery filtering, schedule matching, and the data model that powers it—extracted from the legacy monolith and re‑implemented.
• Own the Two‑Stage Filtering Architecture: zone‑based availability filtering followed by Vespa filtering and ranking
• Drive search relevance and ranking strategy across ordering contexts and customer types, in collaboration with product and data
• Define clear, well‑versioned APIs and contracts for how search and availability are consumed across all channels
• Manage migration sequencing and risk across the phased rollout (Typeahead, Availability, Core Search)
• Build a measurement and experimentation foundation supporting full‑funnel evaluation, from CTR through order fulfillment
• Lead through collaborative design: white‑boarding, technical discussions, and aligning teams around clear architectural decisions
• Partner with Platform Engineering on shared service patterns, Temporal, observability, secrets, and CI/CD
• Partner with product, data, and downstream consumers on relevance, ranking signals, and API contracts
• Act as a technical multiplier through design reviews, code reviews, architectural guidance, and mentorship

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Deep experience designing, building, and tuning search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr, Open Search, Vespa, or equivalent); experience leading a major search re‑architecture or building from scratch is strongly preferred;
  Vespa experience is a significant plus
• Strong proficiency in Go, or a willingness to adopt it as a primary language
• Experience with real‑time data pipelines (Kafka, event streaming) for search indexing
• Strong instincts for relevance and ranking, with the ability to translate product goals into ranking signals and evaluate them with data
• Excellent written and verbal communication around collaborative system design and technical decision‑making
• A…