C++ Search Ranking Engineer

Join Shopify's dynamic engineering team, where code is core and innovation drives commerce forward. As a C++ Search Ranking Engineer, you'll craft high-performance ranking systems that power search across billions of products. Collaborate with AI experts and data scientists to create blazingly fast, relevant search experiences that help merchants succeed at the infinite game of entrepreneurship.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build and optimize core search components including inverted indexes, approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search, and real-time ranking pipelines.
• Own end-to-end delivery of ranking algorithms, from prototyping new relevance models to optimizing query latency in production.
• Profile and optimize critical paths—cache optimization, memory layout, data structures— to achieve sub-millisecond p99 latencies.
• Solve complex information retrieval challenges including semantic search, learning-to-rank, and multi-objective optimization.
• Challenge status-quo and evolve our ranking infrastructure to meet emerging search paradigms.

Qualifications:

• Proven expertise in modern C++ (C++17/20) for building production systems at scale.
• Experience building ranking engines for Search, Ads, or Recommendation systems.
• Deep expertise in search algorithms—BM25, TF-IDF, learning-to-rank, vector search, approximate nearest neighbors.
• Experience with ranking features engineering and model inference in production systems.
• Performance optimization experience—CPU profiling, cache optimization, lock-free programming.
• Strong collaboration skills, working with cross-disciplinary teams including ML engineers and data scientists.