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Salary: USD 110,000 - 130,000 / annual
Constructor is an AI-first e-commerce search and discovery platform launched in 2019, helping global e-commerce brands drive revenue and conversion gains through intelligent product discovery.
The SABR (Search & Browse Request) team owns the top layer of request processing for product discovery. This team manages the service that receives all product discovery requests (autocomplete, search, browse, recommendations) and executes the business logic driving product discovery. The service functions as a gateway that parses incoming requests, orchestrates calls across internal ranking and retrieval services, interprets responses, and assembles final customer-facing results. The team also owns public configuration APIs that customers use to control discovery behavior and the MCP layer exposing functionality to AI agents.
The team owns both platform and product components, participating in every architectural decision for the core product offering while being heavily influenced by direct customer feedback. All services are public APIs, making interface design and backward compatibility constant considerations. The team serves up to 15,000 requests per second, fans out to many internal services per request, and must maintain availability while gracefully degrading when dependencies fail or slow down.
The work involves practical distributed systems: request orchestration, failure isolation, caching, latency budgets, capacity planning, and production observability. Engineers own problems end-to-end from design through on-call.
In this role, you will own the technical direction of one or more services (architecture, performance, reliability); lead design of new systems and public APIs and evolution of existing ones as traffic and feature scope grow; raise the engineering bar through design and code review while mentoring mid and senior engineers; partner with product, other engineering teams, and solutions/support to shape what gets built and represent search constraints honestly; and participate in on-call for owned systems, leading incident response when issues arise.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Substantial experience building and operating high-traffic, low-latency backend services in production
- Extensive Python knowledge (primary language)
- Experience with observability and performance work in live systems
- Experience designing and evolving public APIs that external customers depend on
- Experience designing and implementing scalable service-oriented architectures
- Track record of leading projects spanning multiple engineers and quarters
- Ability to influence without authority and willingness to change position when presented with better arguments
- Clear written communication skills (design docs, RFCs, postmortems)
- Good judgment about trade-offs and scope
- Comfort with ambiguity and loosely defined problems
- Ownership that extends past code merge to how systems behave in production
NICE TO HAVE:
- AWS experience
- Background in search, ranking, information retrieval, or e-commerce product discovery
- Exposure to AI/LLM-facing infrastructure (MCP, agent tooling, or similar)
