Staff Software Engineer - Backend

Join our team...

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.

What you'll get to do...

• 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.

Your experience should include...

• 8+ years building and operating large-scale distributed software systems in production environments.
• 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.
• 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.

You might also have...

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Lucene, Vespa, or similar search technologies.
• Experience building recommendation systems, personalization platforms, or ML-powered customer experiences.
• Knowledge of semantic search, vector databases, embeddings, LLM-powered retrieval, or agentic AI systems.
• Experience with Kafka, Spark, Flink, or large-scale real-time and batch data processing platforms.
• Experience utilizing AI-powered engineering tools to improve software development and delivery.

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.

About us... GoDaddy is empowering everyday entrepreneurs around the world by providing the help and tools to succeed online, making opportunity more inclusive for all. GoDaddy is the place people come to name their idea, build a professional website, attract customers, sell their products and services, and manage their work. Our mission is to give our customers the tools, insights, and people to transform their ideas and personal initiative into success. To learn more about the company, visit About Us.

At GoDaddy, we know diverse teams build better products—period. Our people and culture reflect and celebrate that sense of diversity and inclusion in ideas, experiences and perspectives. But we also know that’s not enough to build true equity and belonging in our communities. That’s why we prioritize integrating diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging principles into the core of how we work every day—focusing not only on our employee experience, but also our customer experience and operations. It’s the best way to serve our mission of empowering entrepreneurs everywhere, and making opportunity more inclusive for all. To read more about these commitments, as well as our representation and pay equity data, check out our Diversity and Pay Parity annual report which can be found on our Diversity Careers page.

We also embrace our diverse culture and offer a range of Employee Resource Groups (Culture). Have a side hustle? No problem. We love entrepreneurs! Most importantly, come as you are and make your own way.

GoDaddy is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. GoDaddy will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with local and federal requirements.Refer to our fullEEO policy.

Our recruiting team is available to assist you in completing your application. If they could be helpful, please reach out to myrecruiter@godaddy.com.

Colorado Residents: In any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information such as age, date of birth, or dates of school attendance or graduation. You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information.

GoDaddy doesn’t accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters or employment agencies.

Compensation & Benefits:

What We Offer:

Working at GoDaddy offers many benefits, including competitive pay, generous time off, parental and wellness leave, healthcare, retirement savings program, and much more. Offerings vary by location.

This role is eligible for a comprehensive benefits package, which includes medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k)-retirement plan, paid sick time, paid flexible time off, paid parental leave, life insurance, short- and long-term disability, AD&D insurance, mental health or EAP programs, remote or hybrid work options, paid holidays, paid Wellness days, tuition assistance, adoption, surrogacy, and fertility benefits, dependent daycare and backup care benefits, Employee stock purchase plan, financial education and advice; and other benefits in accordance with GoDaddy’s benefit plans and applicable law.

Actual compensation and benefits eligibility will be determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location.

Compensation:

The estimated pay ranges for this role are listed below. In addition to base pay, this role may be eligible for other forms of compensation, which may include a corporate bonus and/or equity awards, subject to the terms of applicable plans and individual eligibility.

Bay Area (Santa Clara, San Francisco) and Los Angeles:

$182,000—$273,000 USD

Austin, D.C. Metro, CA (non-Bay Area), HI, IL, MA, NH, OR, VA, WA:

$157,000—$235,000 USD

New York City Metro, Kirkland/Seattle:

$166,800—$250,200 USD

All other US locations not previously listed:

$140,000—$210,000 USD