Senior Backend Software Engineer, Search

About Us

Hungryroot is using AI to build the most consumer-centric food and wellness company to ever exist. We act as your personal assistant for healthy living—getting to know your goals, lifestyle, and budget, and recommending and delivering healthy groceries, easy recipes, and essential supplements for you and your family.

It’s the easiest way to eat healthy, achieve your goals, save time, and discover new foods. We believe food is the foundation of health, convenience should not mean compromise, and that everyone is unique in how they eat and live. That’s why we’re building a future in which healthy living is both easy and enjoyable.

Hungryroot is a distributed team of top talent across 28+ U.S. states. While we have a headquarters in New York City, our remote-first culture emphasizes collaboration, team-building, and flexibility. Expect regular virtual team events, strong ownership and accountability, and an annual company retreat.

About the Role

Hungryroot is looking for a Senior Search Engineer to join our growing Engineering team.

This senior engineer will own and evolve our OpenSearch-powered search platform ("hrsearch"), driving the technical design, implementation, testing, and maintenance of search features that directly shape how customers discover products and recipes. This includes extending hybrid search capabilities (lexical + semantic/KNN), designing index schemas, tuning relevance and ranking, scaling the OpenSearch cluster, and translating new business requirements into search functionality.

This person leverages modern AI-powered development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, and similar assistants as a natural part of their workflow to accelerate delivery, improve code quality, and explore solutions more effectively. They rely on their own deep search expertise while performing additional research as necessary to arrive at the best solution for each task. They can independently execute projects, proactively raise issues, and resourcefully unblock themselves. Some form of mentoring and guiding less experienced or new developers on the team is required. They can constructively debate any issue, persuade others with hard evidence while staying objective and open to changing their mind. They will be the backbone of our search infrastructure and a key driver of product discovery at Hungryroot.

Responsibilities

• Own the search service end-to-end: index design, query pipelines, relevance tuning, cluster health, scaling, and upgrades of our OpenSearch infrastructure.
• Drive important technical discussions around search architecture, hybrid retrieval strategies, embedding model selection, scoring/normalization pipelines, and personalization and help the team arrive at the best possible solution given any constraints we may face.
• Work closely with engineering leads and product stakeholders to translate business requirements (e.g., new facets, dietary filtering, personalized ranking) into performant search features.
• Contribute directly to feature development across the search stack: document mapping, query builders, function scoring, KNN vector search, and the text embeddings inference sidecar.
• Incorporate AI-powered development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) into daily workflows to accelerate prototyping, code review, debugging, and documentation, and help establish best practices for the team's adoption of these tools.
• Help raise the bar on code quality and enforce engineering discipline through code review feedback, testing, technical presentations, and opportunistic refactoring.
• Participate in the interview process for other senior, mid, or junior engineering candidates and contribute to hiring decisions.

Qualifications

• 5+ yrs of commercial software development experience
• 3+ yrs of hands-on experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch (index design, cluster management, query DSL)
• 2+ yrs of experience with semantic/vector search techniques (KNN, approximate nearest neighbor algorithms such as HNSW, embedding models)
• 3+ yrs of experience using Python and the wider ecosystem as the primary day-to-day environment
• 2+ yrs of experience building and tuning search relevance (BM25, function scoring, hybrid retrieval pipelines)
• 2+ yrs of experience troubleshooting production issues in search or data-intensive systems
• Active experience using AI-powered developer tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) to augment coding, debugging, and problem-solving workflows

Nice To Have

• Experience with AWS OpenSearch Service (managed clusters, fine-grained access control, index state management)
• 2+ yrs of experience working with a web framework such as Django (preferred), Flask, or similar
• Familiarity with text embedding models and inference serving (e.g., Hugging Face TEI, sentence-transformers)
• Experience with search observability, query analytics, A/B testing search relevance, and monitoring cluster performance
• Experience with Django REST Framework and building search APIs
• Proficient in leveraging modern AI-powered developer tooling
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC tools such as Terraform)
• Proficiency working with Git
• A bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field

Perks & Benefits

• Remote-first: work from home, work from our NYC office, work from anywhere in the U.S. - you decide!
• Equity
• Unlimited vacation policy
• Universal paid parental leave
• Monthly Hungryroot credit for delicious, healthy groceries
• Comprehensive health, vision, dental, and life insurance
• 401k with Company Match
• A work from home stipend to support your initial home-office setup

Expected Pay Range:
$168,000 - $210,000

Our mission to help make healthy eating easy, accessible, and joyful is better served by a diverse workplace. We are a proud Equal Opportunity Employer committed to building an inclusive workplace. We have zero-tolerance for harassment or discrimination. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability.