Senior Backend Engineer (Search & Scale)

takealot.com; South Africa; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Takealot Group is seeking a Software Engineer (backend, preferably with search experience) to join our team. You will help maintain and scale our search stack, contribute to robust backend services, and participate in transitioning from Elasticsearch to Vertex AI Search.

The role emphasizes building scalable systems in Python with optional Java/Go, collaborating across teams, and delivering high-quality production code while supporting 24/7 operations.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or an Advanced Diploma in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 5 to 10 years in a software development role
• Developing scalable backend systems
• A thorough understanding of computer science fundamentals, including object-oriented design, data structures, and algorithms
• Proficient in a strongly typed open source language such as Python, Java, Golang, etc
• RESTful APIs and web services.
• SQL database systems

Responsibilities

• Design and build solutions to assist our business users and improve customer experience
• Architect and design solutions with your team
• Develop code, making major improvements to non-functional areas
• Develop high-quality production code for work of high complexity and scale
• Utilize and improve functional and non-functional testing practices
• Champion, challenge, and iterate on best practices within engineering
• Design solutions for complex problems with difficult decision trade-offs, typically system or domain-wide
• Participate in and collaborate on architecture proposals across engineering
• Support alignment of architecture across the organisation
• Respond to and resolve bugs in production for systems in your division
• Respond to alerts and support incident response within your division
• Investigate and drive the resolution of issues that impact multiple teams
• Support, challenge existing, and define new engineering processes and directives
• Review and contribute fixes and content to internal documentation
• React to technology trends, identifying risks and opportunities for your division's technologies, systems, and domains
• Share knowledge through blog posts, tech talks, and workshops across engineering
• Contribute to discussions and decisions in the division
• Challenge others to always produce work of the highest quality
• REST and RPC API implementation and maintenance (using Python)
• Develop and maintain automation tests
• Liaise with various internal stakeholders to discuss project requirements, progress, etc.

Skills

Backend development

Search experience

Python

REST APIs

SQL

Java

Go

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

Docker

GitHub

Travis CI

Jenkins

Redis

Memcached

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Job description

Takealot Group is seeking a Software Engineer (backend, preferably with search experience) to join our team. You will help maintain and scale our search stack, contribute to robust backend services, and participate in transitioning from Elasticsearch to Vertex AI Search.

The role emphasizes building scalable systems in Python with optional Java/Go, collaborating across teams, and delivering high-quality production code while supporting 24/7 operations.