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commercetools is a leading commerce platform company that powers the next era of commerce for ambitious enterprises. The company pioneered a flexible approach to commerce architecture and fosters a culture of experimentation and innovation.
As a Senior Search Engineer on the Discovery Team, you will build the retrieval layer behind product discovery for some of the world's most demanding commerce brands. You'll work on the evolution of search as shoppers increasingly type full sentences instead of keywords, and as AI agents become primary API consumers. The team is advancing semantic and hybrid retrieval to general availability while tackling critical challenges: speed, cost-efficiency, measurable improvements across enterprise catalogs, and anticipating what comes next. You will 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
This is a hybrid role requiring three days per week in the Munich, Berlin, London, or Valencia office.
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
