Staff Backend Engineer - Search Features & APIs (SABR)

The role

This person will own the technical direction, architecture, performance, and reliability of one or more services. They will lead the design of new systems and public APIs while mentoring engineers and partnering with product teams.

What you will do

• Own the technical direction of one or more of our services - architecture, performance, and reliability.
• Lead design of new systems and public APIs, and the evolution of existing ones as traffic and feature scope grow.
• Raise the engineering bar through design and code review, and mentor mid and senior engineers into owning bigger scopes.
• Partner with product, other engineering teams, and solutions/support to shape what we build.
• Take part in on-call for the systems you own, and lead incident response and follow-through when things break.

Required qualifications

• Substantial experience building and operating high-traffic, low-latency backend services in production.
• Extensive Python knowledge.
• Experience with observability and performance work in live systems.
• Experience designing and evolving public APIs that external customers depend on.
• Experience designing & implementing scalable service-oriented architectures.
• Track record of leading projects that span multiple engineers and quarters.
• Influence without authority, and willingness to change your position when someone has a better argument.
• Clear written communication - design docs, RFCs, postmortems.
• Good judgment about trade-offs and scope.
• Comfort with ambiguity and loosely defined problems.
• Ownership that extends past merge, to how the system behaves in production.

Nice to have

• Experience with AWS
• Background in search, ranking, information retrieval, or e-commerce product discovery.
• Exposure to AI/LLM-facing infrastructure (MCP, agent tooling, or similar).

Benefits

• Unlimited vacation time
• Fully remote team
• Work from home stipend!
• Apple laptops provided for new employees
• Training and development budget for every employee, refreshed each year
• Maternity & Paternity leave for qualified employees
• Work with smart people who will help you grow and make a meaningful impact
• Base salary: $110k–$130k USD
• Stock options
• Regular team offsites

About the company

Constructor is an AI-first e-commerce search and discovery platform launched in 2019. It helps shoppers find products and enables global e-commerce brands to drive revenue and conversion gains.