Staff Software Engineer, Search

Zocdoc is a leading digital health marketplace focused on improving patient experiences in healthcare. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Search Services team, you will design and build high-performance backend services and data infrastructure to enhance Zocdoc’s search function, making it more intelligent and user-friendly.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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