Senior Search Backend Engineer (m/f/x)

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential ecommerce platform client seeking a Senior Search Backend Engineer for their Discovery team in München, Bayern. This is a hybrid position requiring three days per week in the office.

Our client is tackling one of the most compelling challenges in modern commerce: building retrieval systems that serve both human shoppers and AI agents. Search is evolving from keyword matching to semantic understanding, and you'll be at the center of making that transition fast, cost-effective, and measurably better across enterprise-scale product catalogs.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement search functionalities in a production Scala backend for a multi-tenant PaaS environment
• Develop search capabilities combining lexical, semantic, and hybrid retrieval approaches
• Build and maintain search-related libraries based on ElasticSearch and MongoDB
• Contribute to search relevance, quality measurement, and ranking improvements
• Operate scalable search infrastructure as code on Kubernetes using Terraform in a multi-tenant architecture
• Test components for usability, functionality, and performance while collaborating with Product Management and DevOps
• Work with Scala and functional programming patterns as your primary development tools
• Participate in on-call rotation with a globally distributed team supporting production systems

What We're Looking For

Required qualifications:

• At least 5 years of experience as a Software Engineer with production experience on the JVM
• Solid understanding of parallel and asynchronous programming, plus non-blocking I/O
• Experience developing REST APIs and knowledge of scalable architectures including sharding, replication, load balancing, and failover
• Interest in working with Scala using pragmatic functional programming patterns (we'll support your transition from other JVM languages)
• Fluent English for international team collaboration
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS where tenant isolation is critical
• Knowledge of scalable event-driven architectures with queues and notification topics
• Genuine curiosity for using AI tools effectively and a drive to learn and apply them

Nice to have:

• Hands-on search experience, preferably with ElasticSearch or OpenSearch, including understanding of inverted index scoring and ranking
• Practical exposure to vector retrieval (embeddings, approximate nearest neighbor indexes, hybrid ranking) or deep lexical search background with appetite to explore this territory
• Ability to reason about relevance using data, precision/recall tradeoffs, ranking metrics, and behavioral signals
• Experience with infrastructure technologies like Helm, Kubernetes, and Rust

How We Work With You

When you apply through Get A Job.ai, our talent team will review your profile and conduct an initial screening. If there's a strong match, we'll submit your candidacy to our client and guide you through their interview process. Please apply exclusively through our platform and do not contact the client directly.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process based on your experience and the client's budget for this role.

Equal Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to inclusive recruiting practices. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and work to ensure a fair, transparent hiring process for every candidate.