VP of Search and Discovery Infrastructure

Minimum qualifications6+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure, search, distributed systems, or a related technical field.Experience designing and developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems, data platforms, or search systems.Experience with information retrieval, web crawling, indexing, or large-scale data ingestion.Experience with software architecture and technical system design.Experience providing technical leadership and setting engineering direction.Experience building, leading, or mentoring high-performing engineering teams.Preferred qualificationsAdvanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.Experience building large-scale crawling, search, indexing, or retrieval infrastructure.Experience with distributed computing, large-scale data processing, networking, storage, and cloud infrastructure.Experience with search ranking, query understanding, geographic search, entity resolution, or knowledge graphs.Experience with data extraction from large volumes of structured and unstructured web content.Experience with machine learning or LLM-based information extraction and classification.Experience operating systems that process millions or billions of documents, URLs, entities, or events.Experience in a senior technical leadership role such as Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Engineering Director, VP Engineering, or CTO.Experience at a search, mapping, marketplace, local discovery, or large-scale data platform company is highly relevant. About the jobGoPlay.ai is a discovery and booking platform for local activities. We help people discover classes, programs, camps, sports, recreation, and other activities based on location, interests, availability, age, and other needs. Building that experience requires solving complex engineering problems across information retrieval, web crawling, distributed computing, large-scale system design, data processing, search, and artificial intelligence. We are looking for a VP, Search and Discovery Infrastructure who combines deep technical expertise with strong engineering leadership. You will lead the development of systems capable of discovering information across the public web, retrieving and processing it efficiently, transforming unstructured information into structured data, resolving entities across multiple sources, and making that information searchable. This role is for a builder. We are looking for someone with a strong do-er mentality who enjoys getting directly into difficult technical problems, figuring out how to solve them personally, proving that the approach works, and then designing the systems and teams required to scale those solutions. You should be as comfortable debugging a hard infrastructure problem or prototyping a new approach as you are making architectural decisions, hiring engineers, and setting long-term technical direction. This is not a role for someone who wants to manage technology from a distance. You will define technical direction, make critical infrastructure decisions, build the engineering organization, and remain deeply involved in the systems that form the foundation of the product. ResponsibilitiesProvide technical leadership across GoPlay.ai's engineering organization.Personally tackle difficult technical and architectural problems, validate solutions, and turn successful approaches into scalable systems.Define the architecture and technical strategy for search, crawling, indexing, data processing, and retrieval systems.Design, develop, deploy, maintain, and improve large-scale distributed software systems.Build infrastructure for discovering and continuously retrieving information from large numbers of public web sources.Develop systems for crawl scheduling, prioritization, incremental crawling, change detection, canonicalization, and duplicate detection.Build data pipelines that transform structured and unstructured web content into reliable structured information.Develop entity-resolution systems that identify and consolidate information representing the same real-world entities.Design indexing and retrieval systems supporting geographic, structured, lexical, and semantic search.Establish standards for data quality, freshness, reliability, coverage, and system performance.Make architectural decisions related to compute, storage, networking, databases, indexing, and distributed infrastructure.Build and mentor an engineering team capable of solving large-scale infrastructure problems.Work closely with product leadership to translate product requirements into scalable technical systems.Manage technical priorities, engineering outcomes, infrastructure costs, and long-term platform scalability.Establish the technical foundation required for GoPlay.ai to operate across increasingly large datasets, geographic markets, and user volumes.