Staff Backend Engineer - Search Features & APIs (SABR)
About The Position
Constructor is an AI-first e-commerce search and discovery platform launched in 2019. The SABR team specifically owns the top layer of request processing for product discovery, managing the service that receives and processes requests for autocomplete, search, browse, and recommendations. This service executes business logic, parses user requests, orchestrates calls to internal ranking and retrieval services, interprets responses, and assembles the final customer-facing response. The team also owns public configuration APIs for discovery behavior control and the MCP layer for AI agents. The work involves distributed systems in practice, focusing on request orchestration, failure isolation, caching, latency budgets, capacity planning, and observability, with a strong emphasis on maintaining high availability and graceful degradation under heavy load (up to 15k RPS).
Requirements
- Substantial experience building and operating high-traffic, low-latency backend services in production.
- Extensive Python knowledge (our primary language).
- Experience with observability and performance work in live systems.
- Experience designing and evolving public APIs that external customers depend on.
- Experience designing & implementing scalable service-oriented architectures.
- Track record of leading projects that span multiple engineers and quarters.
- Influence without authority, and willingness to change your position when someone has a better argument.
- Clear written communication (design docs, RFCs, postmortems).
- Good judgment about trade-offs and scope.
- Comfort with ambiguity and loosely defined problems.
- Ownership that extends past merge, to how the system behaves in production.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with AWS
- Background in search, ranking, information retrieval, or e-commerce product discovery.
- Exposure to AI/LLM-facing infrastructure (MCP, agent tooling, or similar).
Responsibilities
- Own the technical direction of one or more of our services, including architecture, performance, and reliability.
- Lead the design of new systems and public APIs, and the evolution of existing ones as traffic and feature scope grow.
- Raise the engineering bar through design and code review.
- Mentor mid and senior engineers into owning bigger scopes.
- Partner with product, other engineering teams, and solutions/support to shape product development and represent search constraints and trade-offs honestly.
- Take part in on-call rotations for owned systems.
- Lead incident response and follow-through when issues arise.
Benefits
- Unlimited vacation time (strongly encouraged to take at least 3 weeks per year)
- Fully remote team
- Work from home stipend
- Apple laptops provided
- Training and development budget for every employee, refreshed each year
- Maternity & Paternity leave for qualified employees
- Work with smart people who will help you grow and make a meaningful impact
- Base salary: $110k–$130k USD, depending on knowledge, skills, experience, and interview results
- Stock options
- Regular team offsites to connect and collaborate
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
