Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

At GoDaddy, we’re on a mission to radically shift the global economy toward small businesses by empowering people to easily start, confidently grow, and successfully run their own ventures

The Domain Search team builds the foundational search and discovery infrastructure that powers GoDaddy’s domain marketplace and helps millions of entrepreneurs find, evaluate, and manage domain names. Our platform sits at the center of the domain purchasing journey, connecting customer intent with highly relevant, personalized recommendations at global scale

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for the search infrastructure that supports multiple products and teams across GoDaddy. You will help drive the evolution of our platform into an intelligent, personalized search experience capable of understanding customer intent, learning from behavioral signals, and delivering highly relevant domain recommendations

This role combines hands-on engineering excellence with architectural leadership. You’ll influence technical strategy, guide cross-functional initiatives, mentor engineers, and help shape the future of search and discovery at GoDaddy

Architect and evolve large-scale search infrastructure that powers domain discovery for millions of customers, designing distributed indexing, retrieval, ranking, and recommendation systems that deliver high performance, scalability, and reliability

Build intelligent search experiences by developing relevance, personalization, and recommendation capabilities that leverage customer intent, behavioral signals, machine learning models, and modern AI technologies to improve search quality and conversion

Lead technical strategy and architectural decisions across search services, APIs, data platforms, and cloud-native systems, influencing engineering direction across multiple teams and products

Engineer highly scalable backend services and distributed systems in AWS, solving complex challenges involving latency, availability, fault tolerance, observability, and operational efficiency at global scale

Write high-quality production code, drive adoption of modern engineering practices, mentor other engineers, and lead the delivery of complex technical initiatives from design through production while continuously raising the organization’s technical bar- 8+ years building and operating large-scale distributed software systems in production environments

Deep experience with cloud-native development, microservices, APIs, and AWS-based infrastructure

Advanced proficiency in Java, Go, C#, or similar object-oriented programming languages

Experience integrating machine learning models into customer-facing production systems

Demonstrated ability to lead technical strategy and architecture across multiple teams

Expert knowledge of search technologies, information retrieval, ranking systems, recommendation platforms, or related domains

Strong software engineering fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, system design, and software architecture

We encourage you to apply even if your experience or skillset doesn’t align perfectly with every requirement. We value a wide range of backgrounds and transferable skills, and we are excited to support learning and growth

Experience with Kafka, Spark, Flink, or large-scale real-time and batch data processing platforms

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Experience utilizing AI-powered engineering tools to improve software development and delivery

Experience building recommendation systems, personalization platforms, or ML-powered customer experiences

Experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Lucene, Vespa, or similar search technologies

Knowledge of semantic search, vector databases, embeddings, LLM-powered retrieval, or agentic AI systems- Submit your resume and/or cover letter in PDF or Docx format