Staff Software Engineer, Zocdoc
Search
$211.1-285k
Salary is applicable NY rates only
2+ days a week in office
API connecting patients to doctors
Open for applications
API connecting patients to doctors
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$211.1-285k
Salary is applicable NY rates only
2+ days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To give power to the patient by delivering the accessible, seamless, and simple experience patients expect and deserve.
Role
Who you are
- Passionate about building sophisticated backend systems — distributed services, data pipelines, and APIs that need to operate at scale with low latency and high reliability
- Excited to architect the infrastructure powering intelligent search — from vector retrieval and cross-encoder reranking to real-time ingestion and indexing
- Motivated by the challenge of integrating ML model serving, embeddings, and LLM-driven flows into production backend systems that serve millions of patients
- A technical leader who thrives on architecting systems, mentoring engineers, and elevating code quality and team-wide execution
- An excellent communicator who collaborates effectively with product, data science, and infrastructure partners
- Energized by solving ambiguous infrastructure and architectural challenges to deliver elegant, robust solutions
- A proven track record of owning and scaling complex, high-traffic backend platforms, with deep expertise in distributed systems design and long-term architectural thinking
- Deep hands-on expertise with C# / .NET or comparable backend frameworks, with a focus on performance optimization, concurrency, and service-oriented architecture
- Significant experience designing and operating large-scale data pipelines, ingestion systems, or stream-processing workflows
- Strong experience with AWS services and cloud-native infrastructure patterns — ECS, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, Kinesis, OpenSearch, S3, and similar
- Familiarity with search technologies, vector databases, embedding models, and ML model serving, with a strong understanding of how to operate these at production scale
- Strong communication skills that align engineering, product, data science, and infrastructure stakeholders around shared goals
- A passion for mentoring engineers, setting engineering best practices, and raising the overall technical quality bar
- Experience designing systems for high availability, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation in latency-sensitive environments
What the job involves
- As a Staff Software Engineer on Zocdoc’s Search Services team, you will play a critical role in evolving one of the most important experiences we deliver to patients: helping them intuitively find and access the care that’s right for them
- Our mission for 2026 and beyond is ambitious—we are transforming Zocdoc’s search function to an intelligent, intent-driven experience using embeddings, LLMs, and modern ranking models
- This evolution requires rethinking our search architecture from the ground up, and delivering personalized, agentic flows that guide patients to care with unprecedented clarity and ease
- You will lead the design and development of the high-performance backend services, APIs, and data infrastructure that make this vision possible
- From our tier-1 search service and vector search systems to cross-encoder ranking pipelines, your work will power the intelligence behind Zocdoc Search
- You’ll set the technical bar for backend engineering excellence while shaping the strategy of Zocdoc Search—helping unlock a new generation of intelligent, scalable, and patient-centered search infrastructure
- Architecting and building core backend services, APIs, and data infrastructure that power Zocdoc’s next-generation search platform
- Redesigning how provider, availability, and content data is ingested and flows through indexing pipelines into search and ML systems
- Designing and optimizing low-latency query paths across our tier-1 search service, vector search infrastructure, and cross-encoder ranking systems
- Integrating ML model serving, embedding generation, and ranking signals into production backend services through scalable, observable patterns
- Driving architectural direction and setting engineering standards across the Search Services organization through design docs, technical deep dives, and high-signal code reviews
- Mentoring engineers on backend best practices, distributed systems design, API architecture, and technical decision-making
- Building robust observability into backend services—measuring, debugging, and improving performance, reliability, and data freshness across the entire search stack
Our take
The healthcare system often runs on inefficiencies; patients call outdated directories, wait weeks for a visit to a professional and are often hit with surprise bills. Zocdoc was founded to streamline the fragmented healthcare experience by putting the patient first.
The platform allows millions of users each month to view open appointment times with doctors, book instantly online, read verified reviews, and keep up-to-date with checkups. The platform works for both in-person and virtual care – the latter of which has seen a substantial increase in demand. Zocdoc is one of the few companies tackling these problems in healthcare.
The company has solidified its position in the SaaS space, in part by forming partnerships with companies such as WellHive, a leader in digital care, to drive healthcare support for veterans. Moving forward, Zocdoc will continue to invest in its platform to optimise its services for its users.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
7% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Feb 2021
$150m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Aug 2015
$130m
SERIES D
Total funding: $452m
Company benefits
- 100% paid employee health benefit options
- Vacation and parental leave packages
- Lunch and snacks on us (in-office)
- Cell phone reimbursement
- Corporate wellness programs with Headspace and Peloton
- Employer funded 401(k) match
Company HQ
SoHo, New York, NY
Leadership
Oliver Kharra
(Co-Founder & Co-Founder)Oliver trained as a doctor in Germany before moving into consulting where he worked for McKinsey. During his seven-year tenure at McKinsey & Co., Oliver developed and implemented new patient utilization models for the national health services of a number of governments and major hospital chains
Nick (Nikhil) Ganju
(Co-Founder & Chief AI Officer)Nick has extensive experience in product development, database management and site architecture. He was responsible for building the earliest iterations of ZocDoc and directly overseeing its development for many of its first years
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