Senior Search Backend Engineer (Scala) – Discovery Team, Hybrid

commercetools; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Learning budget

Parental leave

Equity program

Job summary

commercetools is seeking a Senior Search Engineer to join the Discovery Team in a hybrid role. You will build the retrieval layer behind product discovery for leading commerce brands, tackling semantic and hybrid retrieval from query understanding to index and query costs.

You will design, implement and improve search capabilities on a JVM-based backend, leveraging Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Kubernetes and Terraform. English‑speaking, multi‑tenant SaaS experience encouraged.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer with JVM production experience.
• Strong understanding of parallel and asynchronous programming, and non‑blocking I/O.
• Experience designing REST APIs and scalable architectures (sharding, replication, load balancing, failover).
• Interest in Scala or other JVM languages; willingness to learn.
• 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 (queues, topics).
• Genuine curiosity for using AI tools to work smarter and more effectively.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement search functionalities in a PaaS ecommerce Scala backend.
• Develop search capabilities that combine lexical, semantic, and hybrid retrieval.
• Develop search-related libraries based on ElasticSearch and MongoDB.
• Contribute to search relevance and quality, and how we measure it.
• Run and maintain a scalable search infrastructure on Kubernetes using Terraform and multi‑tenant architecture.
• Test software components for usability, functionality, and performance; collaborate with Product Management and DevOps.
• Learn Scala and functional programming as your main development tools.
• Participate in on‑call rotation with a globally distributed production team.

Skills

JVM backend development

Scala / functional programming

REST APIs

Distributed systems

English communication

AI tool curiosity

On-call / operational readiness

Team collaboration

Tools

ElasticSearch

OpenSearch

MongoDB

Kubernetes

Terraform

Helm

Rust

Scala

Job description

commercetools is seeking a Senior Search Engineer to join the Discovery Team in a hybrid role. You will build the retrieval layer behind product discovery for leading commerce brands, tackling semantic and hybrid retrieval from query understanding to index and query costs.

You will design, implement and improve search capabilities on a JVM-based backend, leveraging Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Kubernetes and Terraform. English‑speaking, multi‑tenant SaaS experience encouraged.