Senior ML Backend Engineer: Fast Search & Recommendations

Salla; Medina; On-site; SAR 200,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

Salla, a leading e-commerce platform in the MENA region, seeks an experienced Backend/Platform Engineer to own the online serving and streaming components of its discovery stack. You will work on fast, fresh, and reliable ranking and recommendation systems that power shopper experiences.

You will collaborate with data scientists and ML engineers to deploy scalable search and ranking models, ensuring robust operation, monitoring, and safe deployment through AB testing and staged rollouts.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building backend or platform systems in production.
• 2+ years operating a production search engine (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Typesense, Vespa or similar) with index lifecycle, analyzers, reindexing at scale.
• Experience building low-latency services under real traffic and the ability to explain p95 latency.
• Streaming ingestion experience with Kafka, Debezium or similar change-data-capture, plus idempotent backfills.
• Strong Python; comfortable shipping in TypeScript.
• Experience shipping changes through A/B tests and staged rollouts.
• Daily use of agentic coding tools such as Claude Code.

Responsibilities

• Online serving: Build and run query and recommendation serving, retrieval, score fusion, filtering, caching.
• Maintain tight latency budgets including double-digit-millisecond p95 for search-as-you-type.
• Design graceful degradation for slow or down model/vector paths.
• Build experiment plumbing and shadow traffic, AB tests, and rollouts.
• Streaming data: Build change-data-capture from source systems into search indexes and feature stores with measured freshness.
• Keep embeddings fresh for new and updated items.
• Run zero-downtime reindexing of multi-million-document collections.
• Build feature logging that turns production traffic into training data for ranking models.
• Integration: Ship changes into product backends and clients, new endpoints, cutovers, experiment flags.
• Collaborate with product engineering on reviews, release windows, and production ownership.
• Operability: Monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and on-call responsibilities for shipped features.

Skills

Backend systems

Production search

Low-latency services

Python

TypeScript

Data-driven ranking

A/B testing

AI tooling awareness

Tools

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

Solr

Kafka

Debezium

Job description

Salla, a leading e-commerce platform in the MENA region, seeks an experienced Backend/Platform Engineer to own the online serving and streaming components of its discovery stack. You will work on fast, fresh, and reliable ranking and recommendation systems that power shopper experiences.

You will collaborate with data scientists and ML engineers to deploy scalable search and ranking models, ensuring robust operation, monitoring, and safe deployment through AB testing and staged rollouts.