Senior Search Backend Engineer

As a Senior Search Engineer on the Discovery Team, you will build the retrieval layer behind product discovery for some of the world's most demanding commerce brands. You would join work at every layer, from query understanding down to the vector index and the cost of a single query.

What you'll do

• Design and implement search functionalities in a PaaS ecommerce Scala backend
• Develop search capabilities that combine lexical, semantic, and hybrid retrieval
• Develop search-related libraries based on ElasticSearch and MongoDB
• Contribute to search relevance and quality, and to how we measure it
• Run and maintain a scalable search "infrastructure as code" on top of Kubernetes using terraform and multi-tenant architecture
• Test software components regarding usability, functionality, and performance, and work closely with Product Management and DevOps
• Take part in on-call rotation with a worldwide distributed team for production systems

What you'll need

• At least 5 years of experience as a Software Engineer, with production experience on the JVM
• Solid understanding of parallel and asynchronous programming, as well as non-blocking I/O
• Experience developing REST APIs and knowledge of scalable architectures, including sharding, replication, load balancing, and failover
• Interest in working with Scala using pragmatic functional programming patterns
• Fluent English for work in international teams
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS where one tenant's load must never affect another's
• Knowledge of scalable event-driven architectures, including queues and notification topics

Nice to have

• Hands-on search experience, preferably ElasticSearch or OpenSearch, including a working understanding of how an inverted index scores and ranks documents
• Practical exposure to vector retrieval, such as embeddings, approximate nearest neighbor indexes, and hybrid ranking
• Comfort reasoning about relevance with data, including precision and recall tradeoffs, ranking metrics, and behavioral signals
• Experience with infrastructure work and other technologies like Helm, Kubernetes, and Rust

What they offer

• Comprehensive health benefits for you and your dependents, including access to OpenUp for personalized mental health support
• Learning and development opportunities including an annual learning budget, access to self-paced learning platforms and language training
• Family Leave Plus with additional fully paid weeks of parental leave on top of government-provided leave
• Equity participation program to share in company success