SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
commercetools is a leading commerce platform powering the next era of commerce for ambitious enterprises. The company enables AI-driven solutions, bridges digital and physical shopping experiences, and helps industries connect with customers at scale.
As a Senior Search Engineer on the Discovery Team, you will architect and build the retrieval layer behind product discovery for some of the world's most demanding commerce brands. Search is evolving: shoppers now type full sentences instead of keywords, and increasingly the client calling the API is an AI agent rather than a person. You will work on taking semantic and hybrid retrieval to general availability, tackling hard problems around speed, cost-efficiency, measurable relevance improvements across enterprise catalogs, and exploring what comes next. You'll engage at every layer—from query understanding through vector indexing to query cost optimization.
Key responsibilities:
- Design and implement search functionalities in a PaaS ecommerce Scala backend
- Develop within a scalable, multi-tenant architecture
- Analyze user needs and discuss technical approaches with stakeholders
- Test software components for usability, functionality, and performance
- Collaborate closely with Product Management and DevOps teams
- Participate in on-call rotations with a globally distributed team for production systems
The role is hybrid, requiring three days per week in one of the company's offices: Munich, Berlin, London, or Valencia.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer working in search
- Experience building search solutions on top of search engines such as Elasticsearch (preferred), Solr, OpenSearch, or similar
- Aspiration to constantly improve yourself and learn new technologies
- Fluent English communication skills for international team collaboration
- AI Aptitude: genuine curiosity for using AI tools to work smarter and effectively, with drive to learn and apply them in your role
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience with modern search stacks and strategies to optimize search relevance (Vector and Hybrid Search, Learning to Rank, Re-ranker)
- Experience developing REST APIs and knowledge of scalable event-driven architectures (queues, notification topics, sharding, replication, load balancing, failover)
- Experience working with Scala or other functional programming languages
- Experience with infrastructure work and technologies like Helm, Kubernetes, and Rust
