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commercetools is a leading commerce platform company that powers the next era of commerce for enterprises. They are building modern, integrated search experiences for customers, providing search APIs for product discovery and foundational search capabilities across domains.
As a Senior Search Backend Engineer on the Discovery Team, you will 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 AI agents increasingly call the API rather than people. You will join work at every layer—from query understanding down to the vector index and query cost optimization—as commercetools takes semantic and hybrid retrieval to general availability.
Key responsibilities:
- Design and implement search functionalities in a PaaS ecommerce Scala backend
- Develop search capabilities combining lexical, semantic, and hybrid retrieval approaches
- Develop search-related libraries based on Elasticsearch and MongoDB
- Contribute to search relevance, quality measurement, and metrics
- Run and maintain scalable search infrastructure as code on Kubernetes using Terraform and multi-tenant architecture
- Test software components for usability, functionality, and performance; collaborate with Product Management and DevOps
- Learn Scala and functional programming as primary development tools
- Participate in on-call rotation with a worldwide distributed team for production systems
The role is hybrid, requiring three days per week in the Valencia, Munich, Berlin, or London office.
REQUIREMENTS:
- At least 5 years of experience as a Software Engineer with production JVM experience
- Solid understanding of parallel and asynchronous programming, non-blocking I/O
- Experience developing REST APIs and knowledge of scalable architectures (sharding, replication, load balancing, failover)
- Interest in working with Scala using pragmatic functional programming patterns (support provided if coming from another JVM language)
- Fluent English for international team collaboration
- Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS where one tenant's load must not affect another's
- Knowledge of scalable event-driven architectures (queues, notification topics)
- Genuine curiosity for using AI tools to work smarter and willingness to learn and apply them in the role
NICE TO HAVE:
- Hands-on search experience (Elasticsearch or OpenSearch), including understanding of inverted index scoring and ranking
- Practical exposure to vector retrieval (embeddings, approximate nearest neighbor indexes, hybrid ranking)
- Comfort reasoning about relevance with data (precision/recall tradeoffs, ranking metrics, behavioral signals)
- Experience with infrastructure work (Helm, Kubernetes, Rust)
