Senior Search Backend Engineer

About the role

commercetools is looking for a Senior Search Backend Engineer to join its Search Foundation Team and build a modern, integrated search experience for customers. You will develop a search API for product discovery and the foundations of search capabilities across domains, working on the retrieval layer behind product discovery for demanding commerce brands. The role is hybrid, with three days a week in the Munich, Berlin, London or Valencia office.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement search functionality in a PaaS e-commerce Scala backend
• Build search capabilities combining lexical, semantic and hybrid retrieval
• Develop search-related libraries based on ElasticSearch and MongoDB
• Contribute to search relevance and quality, and to how it is measured
• Run and maintain a scalable search infrastructure as code on Kubernetes using Terraform and multi-tenant architecture
• Test software components for usability, functionality and performance, working closely with Product Management and DevOps
• Join the on-call rotation with a worldwide distributed team for production systems

Required profile

• At least 5 years of experience as a software engineer with production experience on the JVM
• 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
• A genuine curiosity for using AI tools to work smarter and more effectively

Required skills

• Solid understanding of parallel and asynchronous programming and non-blocking I/O
• Experience developing REST APIs and scalable architectures (sharding, replication, load balancing, failover)
• Interest in Scala with pragmatic functional programming patterns; support offered for coming from another JVM language
• Nice to have: hands-on search experience with ElasticSearch or OpenSearch, vector retrieval (embeddings, approximate nearest neighbor, hybrid ranking), Helm, Kubernetes and Rust

What we offer

• Comprehensive health benefits for you and your dependents, including mental health support
• Learning and development opportunities, including an annual learning budget, mentorship and leadership programs
• Family Leave Plus with additional fully paid weeks of parental leave
• Equity participation program