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commercetools is a leading commerce platform company powering the next era of commerce for ambitious enterprises. 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 rapidly. Shoppers now type full sentences instead of keywords, and increasingly the clients calling the API are AI agents rather than people. You will join the effort to take semantic and hybrid retrieval to general availability, tackling hard problems: making it fast, affordable, and measurably better across enterprise catalogs, while exploring what comes next. You will work at every layer, from query understanding down to the vector index and query cost optimization.
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 and quality 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 in close collaboration 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
This is a hybrid role requiring three days per week in the Munich, Berlin, London, or Valencia office.
Requirements:
- At least 5 years of experience as a Software Engineer with production experience on the JVM
- Solid understanding of parallel and asynchronous programming, and 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 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
- Genuine curiosity for using AI tools to work smarter and effectively, with drive to learn and apply them
Nice to Have:
- Hands-on search experience with 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)
