Senior Search Backend Engineer (m/f/x)

The role

You will build the retrieval layer behind product discovery for commerce brands. You will design and implement search functionalities in a PaaS ecommerce Scala backend and develop search capabilities combining lexical, semantic, and hybrid retrieval.

What you will 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
• Work closely with Product Management and DevOps
• Learn Scala and functional programming
• Take part in on-call rotation with a worldwide distributed team

Required qualifications

• 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
• 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
• A genuine curiosity for using AI tools to work smarter and more effectively

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

Benefits

• 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, personalized coaching, mentorship, and leadership programs
• Family Leave Plus gives you additional fully paid weeks of parental leave on top of government-provided leave
• Equity participation program

About the company

commercetools powers the next era of commerce for customers. They help ambitious companies experiment, scale, and grow through AI-driven solutions and flexible commerce architecture.