Senior Search Backend Engineer

commercetools

. Design and implement search functionalities in a PaaS ecommerce Scala backend .

Posted 9/15/2026full-timeLondon • United KingdomSeniorWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in designing and implementing search functionalities within a PaaS ecommerce environment, utilizing Scala and functional programming. Proficient in developing scalable architectures and search-related libraries, with a strong focus on performance and relevance metrics.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Scala DevelopmentElasticsearchKubernetesREST API DevelopmentMulti-Tenant SaaS Experience

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Hard Skills

Software EngineeringParallel ProgrammingAsynchronous ProgrammingNon-Blocking I/OSearch InfrastructureSearch Relevance MeasurementHybrid RetrievalEvent-Driven ArchitecturesInfrastructure as CodeFunctional Programming

Soft Skills

CollaborationCuriosityCommunication

Tools & Technologies

TerraformMongoDBHelmRustAI Tools

Industry Keywords

PaaSEcommerceScalable ArchitecturesLoad BalancingShardingReplicationFailoverInverted-Index ScoringDocument RankingApproximate-Near-Neighbor Indexes

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

ElasticSearchKubernetesMongoDBRustScalaTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design and implement search functionalities in a PaaS ecommerce Scala backend
Develop search capabilities combining lexical, semantic, and hybrid retrieval
Develop search-related libraries based on Elasticsearch and MongoDB
Contribute to search relevance, quality, and measurement
Run and maintain scalable search infrastructure as code on Kubernetes using Terraform and multi-tenant architecture
Test software components for usability, functionality, and performance
Work closely with Product Management and DevOps
Learn and use Scala and functional programming as main development tools
Participate in an on-call rotation with a worldwide distributed team for production systems

Requirements

What you’ll need

At least 5 years of experience as a Software Engineer
Production experience on the JVM
Solid understanding of parallel and asynchronous programming
Knowledge of non-blocking I/O
Experience developing REST APIs
Knowledge of scalable architectures, including sharding, replication, load balancing, and failover
Interest in working with Scala using pragmatic functional programming patterns
Fluent English for work in international teams
Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS
Knowledge of scalable event-driven architectures, including queues and notification topics
Curiosity for using AI tools and willingness to learn and apply them
Hands-on search experience, preferably Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, including understanding of inverted-index scoring and document ranking (nice to have)
Practical exposure to vector retrieval, embeddings, approximate-nearest-neighbor indexes, and hybrid ranking (nice to have)
Comfort reasoning about relevance using precision, recall, ranking metrics, and behavioral signals (nice to have)
Experience with infrastructure technologies such as Helm, Kubernetes, and Rust (nice to have)

Benefits

Comp & perks

Comprehensive health benefits for you and your dependents
Access to OpenUp for personalized mental health support
Annual learning budget
Access to self-paced learning platforms
Language training
Personalized coaching
Mentorship
Leadership programs
Additional fully paid weeks of parental leave through Family Leave Plus
Equity participation program