Senior ML Backend Engineer, Search & Recommendations Platform

Salla; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Salla is seeking a senior backend/platform engineer to own the online systems that turn catalogue changes into ranked shopper results. You’ll shape search, retrieval, recommendations, streaming data, and experiments within our self-owned discovery stack.

The role collaborates with data scientists and product teams to keep systems fast, fresh, and reliable, balancing latency, scale, and producibility across the stack.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building backend or platform systems in production.
• 2+ years operating a production search engine (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Typesense or similar)
• Low‑latency services under real traffic; able to explain latency drivers and p95.
• Streaming ingestion: Kafka, Debezium or similar change-data-capture.

Responsibilities

• Online serving: Build and run query and recommendation serving with retrieval, score fusion, filtering, caching.
• Maintain tight latency budgets with p95 targets for search-as-you-type.
• Implement graceful degradation and experiment plumbing (shadow traffic, A/B, guardrails).
• Streaming data: capture changes into search indexes and feature stores; keep embeddings fresh.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

Backend development

Production monitoring

Tools

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

Solr

Kafka

Debezium

Job description

Salla is seeking a senior backend/platform engineer to own the online systems that turn catalogue changes into ranked shopper results. You’ll shape search, retrieval, recommendations, streaming data, and experiments within our self-owned discovery stack.

The role collaborates with data scientists and product teams to keep systems fast, fresh, and reliable, balancing latency, scale, and producibility across the stack.