Senior Backend Engineer

Vend; Oslo; Hybrid; NOK 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Vend in Oslo/Stockholm is hiring a Backend Engineer for the Discovery team. You will build high-throughput search interfaces, vector search, and embeddings pipelines that power real-time discovery for millions of users.

You’ll work closely with data scientists to translate experiments into production systems, design robust APIs, and help shape the platform direction across Nordic marketplaces. This role offers a hybrid office/remote setup.

Qualifications

• Strong JVM/Kotlin backend experience with a focus on scalable services.
• Ability to collaborate with data scientists to deploy experiments.
• Experience designing robust and composable APIs for multiple verticals.
• Familiarity with embeddings, vector search, and ML model integration.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve search services and indexing pipelines.
• Develop hybrid search combining lexical and semantic retrieval.
• Advance recommendation systems across Nordic marketplaces.
• Turn data science experiments into production systems.
• Shape platform direction and API surface for multiple teams.
• Maintain Nordic marketplace-scale reliability and performance.

Skills

JVM

Kotlin

Backend services

Data science collaboration

API design

Embeddings pipeline

Vector search

Tools

Claude Code

Job description

THE OPPORTUNITY IN A NUTSHELL

You? A Backend Engineer who enjoys tackling complex, open-ended problems across search, relevance, and ranking, while working closely with data scientists.

Role? Backend Engineer in our Discovery team, the team behind search and recommendations for all our marketplaces.

Tech? We build high-throughput search interfaces, integrate vector search and embeddings pipeline infrastructure, and productionize machine learning models that power real-time discovery for millions of users.

Company? Vend, parent company of FINN, Blocket, Tori, Oikotie, DBA, Bilbasen, as well as other top brands, where millions of people across the Nordics connect to find what they need, whether it’s a job, a home, a way to move, or a fresh start.

Location? Join us in our central and modern Oslo or Stockholm office with the flexibility to work 3 days per week remotely!

Sounds like your cup of tea? Check out the details below!

WHY YOU’LL LOVE IT HERE

• Real scale. Millions of searches a day across our verticals and the nordics.
• A platform being built, not maintained.
• Interesting technical challenges to solve.
• A company where search is the product, not merely just a feature.
• Engineers and data scientists in the same team.

WHO ARE YOU?

• Are strong on the JVM. Most of our code is Kotlin, but we care more about your ability to build solid backend services than whether you’ve been writing Kotlin or Java most recently.
• Enjoy tackling complex problems. Relevance is never really “done”, and ranking is full of trade‑offs where there’s rarely a single right answer. You enjoy digging into these kinds of problems, making thoughtful decisions, and improving things over time.
• Work well with data scientists. We have them on the team, and their backlog is full of good ideas. We're looking for someone who can meet them halfway - turn an experiment into a production system, and understand enough about embeddings, evaluation and model behaviour to have useful technical discussions.
• Think in platforms. You care about the API you expose, the abstraction you're asking other teams to work with, and what happens when four verticals need four slightly different things.
• Use AI tools with intent. The team leans heavily on tools like Claude Code, and we’re still figuring out what that means for how we build software. Bring your opinions, curiosity, and a willingness to experiment.
• Communicate well in English. You’ll work across a Nordic organisation, so you should be comfortable collaborating with people across teams, functions, and countries.

WHAT'S THE JOB LIKE?

• Build and evolve our search services - indexing pipelines, query handling, and the APIs verticals consume.
• Work on hybrid search, combining lexical and semantic retrieval. This is where we think the platform's future is, and there's plenty still to figure out.
• Develop the recommendation systems used across all verticals, from candidate generation to serving.
• Turn data science work into production systems, together with the data scientists on the team.
• Shape the platform direction - helping decide what we expose, what we abstract away, and what verticals get to control themselves.
• Keep it all running at Nordic marketplace scale, where slow search is broken search.

WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS

Search is at the heart of everything we do. Our team powers search, saved alerts, and recommendations for all of Vend’s marketplaces. We're a core team: our customers are the product teams in Mobility, Recommerce, Jobs and Real Estate, and through them, everyone using our marketplaces. Today we have over 300 million total visits every month!

We’re rebuilding our search setup into a flexible place where individual marketplace teams can easily shape their own results, tune their own weights, and bring their own data models. Getting there means building clean APIs, smart connections behind the scenes, and hybrid search that just works. It’s an exciting challenge with plenty of impactful work to be done, which is exactly why we’re hiring.

A few words from the hiring manager, Henrik Sandberg

“The Discovery team has an unusually large footprint across the business. When search or recommendations are down, our marketplaces stop working. That comes with responsibility, but it also means the work genuinely matters and you can see the impact of what you build. What I’m looking for is someone who’s comfortable sitting in the middle of things: between search and recommendations, between engineering and data science, and between our platform and the verticals building on it. Someone who finds these problems interesting and is excited to learn the tools needed to solve them. I try to lead with trust and clarity. I’ll tell you what we’re trying to achieve and why, and then give you the space to figure out how to get there. I care about giving you room to do great work, take ownership, and grow along the way.