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 for production systems

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
• 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
• 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
• Our equity participation program allows you to share in our success

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 commerce architecture.