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United States
Remote only
What the Role Is
We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer who’ll be the technical lead for a new Search team at Babylist. This new team will be focused on moving Babylist’s search capability in-house, making our search results more relevant and personalized, and partnering with other teams to transform search in the product from functional to delightful.
Registry building is the heart of the Babylist product. Every parent builds a list of dozens of products, from swaddle to stroller, with real stakes (a friend or family member is going to buy these things, and a baby is going to use them). As a universal registry, this registry also typically spans many retailers. This makes registry building on Babylist one of the most interesting search and personalization problems in consumer e-commerce.
This is zero-to-one work, with big ambitions. You’d build a search capability from the ground up, with a clear mandate from leadership to do it. In your first year, we expect to have rebuilt search to be highly relevant and personalized, and delivered big bets like universal search: one experience across items we sell and items from other retailers, and across products, guides and registries. We also want to work with Addie, our AI registry assistant, to have LLMs play a role in the search experience.
If you want to tune an established search system, this isn’t the right role. If you’ve worked inside a strong search team and want to build a new system from scratch at a company earlier in that journey, read on.
What You'll Own
A Staff Engineer at Babylist sets direction. You’ll be the technical lead for search: you decide where it goes over the next year or two, sequence the bets that get there, and make the technical and product calls along the way. You’re still in the code and will drive initiatives forward across multiple teams. You’ll have software engineering and machine learning engineering support on the team.
A few examples of initiatives you’d drive on the Search team:
Like every Staff Engineer here, you will:
You meet the Staff bar at Babylist. You’ve shipped production systems for enough years to have earned strong opinions, and you hold them loosely. You can pick up an ambiguous problem and start moving before anyone hands you the full picture. You’ve already changed how a team builds with AI, and the new way stuck.
On top of that, you’ve worked on search problems before, ideally in an e-commerce setting. This role needs depth in the systems behind search and a clear focus on the people using it. You bring:
Compensation
We post real numbers. For a US-based Staff Engineer, the starting base salary range is $233,500 to $290,700, plus a target annual bonus of 20 percent of base. That's total target cash of roughly $280,200 to $348,840. On top of that you get meaningful equity and a 401(k) match. Where you start in that range depends on your experience, and your pay grows from there with performance and scope.
How We Build
AI is the default here. Engineers run agentic sessions for most of the work, and a lot of the interesting engineering now lives in the scaffolding that makes the agents good: the eval harnesses, the curated context, custom review skills and fast CI. Agents also triage incidents and handle a big share of support. A human always owns the outcome.
The architecture is intentionally simple: one Rails monolith, MySQL and few moving parts. That's deliberate. Simple infrastructure lets us move fast and lets AI reason about the whole system, so the hardest problems are the ones in front of customers.
The Stack
Why Babylist
An engineer, expecting her first baby, couldn't find the registry she wanted. So she built it. That's how Babylist started, and it's still how we work: engineers solving problems for families. Becoming a parent is one of the biggest moments in a person's life. Millions reach it for the first time every year, making thousands of decisions and figuring it out as they go. That's who we build for, and we're a long way from done.
Ten million people give gifts through Babylist every year. We did more than $750M in revenue in 2025, up 45 percent over the year before, and we've been profitable for eight years while staying independent. So you can take on a hard, multi-year problem without watching over your shoulder for the next round or the next correction. And the team is small, around 65 engineers, so what you ship stays visible and your scope stays wide.
How We Work
Remote-first across the US and Canada, and we have been for years. That's not changing. We trust you to own your time and your outcomes, and we get everyone in a room together twice a year. Teams are small, pods of three to five engineers, so nothing you ship disappears into a committee. You'll work shoulder to shoulder with product, design and data, and with the partners across the business who rely on what you ship. You'll also stay close to customers yourself: sitting in on user interviews, watching session recordings, riding along with support. Here that's part of the engineering job, on a regular basis.
How We Hire
Three rounds, usually two to three weeks start to finish.
Benefits
A Few Things to Know
