Real innovation starts with a strong foundation, and at commercetools, that comes from the perfect balance of our product and our people.
The kind of people who not only pioneered a more versátil approach to commerce architecture but also shaped the culture of experimentation that approach unlocked. Together, they are the engine of commerce innovation today.
Whether it’s AI-driven solutions that help enterprises make smarter business decisions, bridging digital and physical shopping experiences, or enabling entirely new ways for industries to connect with their customers, we help the world’s most ambitious companies experiment, scale, and grow without limits.
As our Senior Search Engineer , you’ll support the Search Foundation Team by developing a modern, integrated search experience for our customers, providing them with a search API for product discovery and the foundations of search capabilities across domains.
As a Senior Search Engineer on our Discovery Team , you will build the retrieval layer behind product discovery for some of the world’s most demanding commerce brands.
We are on the path to take our semantic and hybrid retrieval to general availability, and tackling the hard problems: making it fast, affordable, measurably better across enterprise catalogs, and working out what comes after it. 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 to how we measure it
Run and maintain a scalable search “infrastructure as code” on top of Kubernetes using terraform and multi-tenant architecture
Test software components regarding usability, functionality, and performance, and work closely with Product Management and DevOps
Learn Scala and functional programming as your new main development tools




Take part in on-call rotation with a worldwide distributed team for production systems
This role is hybrid, with three days a week spent in our Munich, Berlin, London or Valencia office.
You need to be a strong backend engineer who is genuinely interested in retrieval quality.
At least 5 years of experience as a Software Engineer, with production experience on the JVM
Experience developing REST APIs and knowledge of scalable architectures, including sharding, replication, load balancing, and failover
Interest in working with Scala using pragmatic functional programming patterns. If you come from another JVM language, we will support you in picking it up.
Fluent English for work in international teams
Knowledge of scalable event-driven architectures, including queues and notification topics
Hands-on search experience, preferably ElasticSearch or OpenSearch, including a working understanding of how an inverted index scores and ranks documents
Practical exposure to vector retrieval, such as embeddings, approximate nearest neighbor indexes, and hybrid ranking, and a sense of where each approach breaks down. Comfort reasoning about relevance with data, including precision and recall tradeoffs, ranking metrics, and behavioral signals
Experience with infrastructure work and other technologies like Helm, Kubernetes, and Rust
Learning and development opportunities including an annual learning budget, access to self-paced learning platforms and language training, personalized coaching, mentorship, and leadership programs
We are committed to building a team that reflects the world around us because we know it’s the only way to build the future. As an equal opportunity employer, we believe that our strength lies in our diversity, and we invite you to be a part of our global community.
We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes our company better.
We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.
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📌 Senior Backend Engineer - Kubernetes (Valencia)
🏢 Commercetools
📍 Valencia