HHiring Reality
← Commercetools

Senior Search Backend Engineer (m/f/x)

Commercetools
Location
Berlin, Germany (Hybrid)
Posted
5 days ago
Department
Engineering
What they actually want (must-haves)
  • 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
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, and a sense of where each approach breaks down
  • 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 the job really is

As a Senior Search Backend Engineer at commercetools, you will design and implement search functionalities for a PaaS ecommerce Scala backend, focusing on retrieval quality and performance. Your role involves developing search capabilities that integrate various retrieval methods, maintaining scalable infrastructure, and collaborating with product management and DevOps teams. You will also participate in on-call rotations and have the opportunity to learn Scala and functional programming.

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
Things to weigh
  • The role requires a strong backend engineering background rather than a focus on machine learning research.
  • The position involves on-call rotations, which may require availability outside of regular hours.
Job score3.2/5
Benefits2/5
Freshness5/5
Career value4/5
Role clarity5/5
Pay transparency0/5

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