Senior Software Engineer, Recommendations

About the role

At Lyft, our purpose is to serve and connect. We aim to achieve this by cultivating a work environment where all team members belong and have the opportunity to thrive.

Lyft is looking for software engineers from a scope of disciplines. We are growing our team with people who want to build, improve and incorporate technologies that make the lives of our community more enriched. As an engineer at Lyft, you'll collaborate with teams like product, data science, analytics, and operations on code that empowers us to iterate quickly, while focusing on delighting our passengers and drivers.

The Applied AI team is looking for a senior software Engineer to join the Recommendations team. You will build the backend systems that decide what we surface to riders. You will architect the pipelines and services that turn rider context and signals into the right offer at the right moment, driving a measurable impact on rider experience.

Responsibilities:

- Establish engineering best practices and patterns; help uplift the team's craft and drive a culture of engineering excellence

- Drive high-impact projects and innovate new solutions to deliver the best user experience

- Produce and drive scalable system design for large, complex features — from idea through execution and launch

- Mentor engineers on the team, providing technical guidance and supporting their growth

- Champion and evangelize the use of AI tools to accelerate engineering productivity across the team, sharing patterns and best practices that raise the bar for how the team builds

- Write well-crafted, well-tested, readable, maintainable code

- Participate in code reviews to ensure code quality and share knowledge across the team

- Participate in the team's on-call rotation; identify, triage, debug, and resolve issues across our applications and platforms

- Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain the various trade offs made in decisions

- Manage project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables.

Experience:

- BS/MS or equivalent in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field or equivalent practical experience.

- 5+ years of software engineering/production infrastructure industry experience.

- Experience with Python and Go.

- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), distributed systems, and databases such as PostgreSQL or DynamoDB

- Proficient and effective in using AI tools (e.g. Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) to accelerate coding and engineering workflows

- Proficiency in object-oriented programming.

- Experience working with data structures or algorithms.

- Ability to work with a low-ego, highly collaborative, and cross-functional team.

- Bonus points: Experience building real-time serving systems for ML models, working with recommendation or ranking systems, feature stores, or online/offline experimentation frameworks.