Staff Software Engineer, ezCater
Search Platform
$184-232k
OTE
+ Equity
More information about location
Online marketplace for business catering
Be an early applicant
Online marketplace for business catering
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$184-232k
OTE
+ Equity
More information about location
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To provide businesses with access to high-quality and fast corporate catering, 24/7.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Deep experience designing, building, and tuning search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch, 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 pragmatic, collaborative mindset with strong ownership and systems thinking
- Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, or equivalent) is a plus
- Familiarity with geospatial systems and spatial filtering is a plus
What the job involves
- 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
Our take
ezCater is an online marketplace app that provides catering options for businesses, working with food providers who enter their menus onto the app for customers to browse. ezCater sends each store its orders and handles customer service while the food providers fulfil the orders.
ezCater profits by charging a small commission on all orders that restaurants fulfil. The company counts JLL, RingCentral and the San Francisco 49ers among its customers. It previously fuelled expansion through acquisitions such as online catering platform GoCater in 2018 and MonkeySoft Solutions in 2019.
ezCater has enjoyed strong growth so far, in part by focusing on meal deliveries to a growing hybrid workforce as an employee benefit. It has been eyeing an IPO for some time, though these plans are yet to come to fruition. In the meantime, it has continued to develop its technology and unveiled a new supplier diversity program to uplift small businesses owned by underrepresented groups.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
26% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 10 rounds)
Dec 2021
$100m
SERIES D
Apr 2019
$150m
SERIES D
Total funding: $433.9m
Company benefits
- Unlimited Vacation
- Stock Options
- Medical & Dental Insurance
- Subsidized MBTA Passes
- 401k Match
- Stocked Kitchen
- Company Outings
- Parental Leave
- Cupcakes
Company HQ
Financial District, Boston, MA
Leadership
Stefania Mallett
(Co-Founder & Director)Former CEO of the company. Studied at MIT before spending 20 years in leadership positions at firms including IntraNet, Taskmail, More than Words, and InSite Marketing Technology.
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