Senior Search and Recommendations Engineer, Store

The role

You will own search relevance and recommendations for Apify Store, the marketplace where people and AI agents find Actors. You will work on retrieval, ranking, query understanding, evaluation, and the category taxonomy as the catalog grows.

What you will do

• Own Store search relevance end to end: retrieval, ranking, and query understanding.
• Tune the Recombee setup: scenarios, business rules, and signals for recommendations.
• Improve the evaluation stack (LLM-based evals, relevance metrics, A/B tests) to catch regressions early.
• Keep discovery healthy as the catalog grows, refining signals, ranking, and categorization.
• Evolve the Actor category taxonomy and the classification behind Store filtering.
• Make Store work for AI agents as well as people, returning the right Actor on the first call.
• Shape technical direction for search and recommendations and build team expertise.

Required qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years owning search or recommendation relevance in production at a marketplace, e-commerce, or content platform.
• Judgment to assess existing search, ranking, or recommendation setups and decide which problems to fix.
• Hands-on experience in search relevance: ranking functions, query understanding, filtering, and sorting.
• Experience configuring and tuning recommendation systems, including cold-start and sparse-data problems.
• Experience evolving category taxonomies and classification for a large, growing catalog.
• Rigor in measuring relevance, with A/B testing experience used to change product decisions.
• Strong backend skills shipping production services and data pipelines in TypeScript/Node.js.

Nice to have

• Embeddings, hybrid lexical and vector retrieval, and LLMs applied to retrieval, re-ranking, query rewriting, or evaluation.
• Enough React/TypeScript to ship changes to Store search and listing pages.
• Ability to explain ranking trade-offs to product, design, and data colleagues.

Benefits

• Stock options and profit sharing
• Unlimited Claude access for every Apifier
• Nobody counts holidays as long as the work gets done
• Free Apify credits for friends and family
• Free Multisport card
• Regular office massages, mostly covered by Apify
• Pets, kids, and bikes welcome at the office
• Team buildings and offsites with biking, canoeing, and other adventures
• Education and training budget, conference tickets, internal Eat & Learn sessions
• Generous hardware budget
• Free lunches on office days
• Free drinks and snacks

Before you apply

• Recombee, MongoDB Atlas, and GrowthBook are role-specific tools.

About the company

Apify is the largest marketplace of trusted tools for AI that automate work on the web. Actors are created by a global community of builders who earn from them, while Apify manages infrastructure, billing, and distribution.