Staff Backend Engineer - Search FX (Discovery Experience)
About The Position
The Discovery Search team (Search FX) sits at the intersection of search, evaluation, and personalization shaping how retailers find the products they love. Our mission is to build the most intuitive, intelligent, and delightful discovery experience in wholesale: one that feels less like a search engine and more like a trusted merchant with an encyclopedic knowledge of what's in stock and what will sell. As a Staff Engineer on the Search FX team, you will be a primary technical architect for our retailer-facing search surfaces. You will own the technical roadmap for search, recommendations, and Gen-AI experiences that drive a meaningful share of marketplace engagement. You will bridge the gap between high-scale infrastructure and world-class UX, helping unify retrieval, ranking, and personalization into a cohesive, high-performance system.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years as a technical leader driving complex, cross-team projects.
- A strong user-first mindset and the ability to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical direction.
- Experience partnering with Data Science to deploy and leverage machine learning and gen-AI systems in search experiences across ranking and retrieval.
- Knowledge of search/query processing, including traditional, semantic, and hybrid frameworks (e.g., Elasticsearch, Lucene).
- Strong programming skills in Kotlin or Java, with experience in high-performance backend systems, Protocol Buffers, and MySQL.
- Demonstrated ability to contribute to team strategy without supervision and influence the broader organizational roadmap.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design of composable grids, intent-aware routing, and orchestration layers that unify retrieval and ranking.
- Leverage LLMs to consolidate the QU stack, improving accuracy for long-tail queries and edge cases.
- Drive initiatives to increase retrieval candidates (e.g., 10x growth) while maintaining stable search latency.
- Develop systems like "Search Missions" that use offline pipelines and LLMs to recover failed search sessions through expanded queries.
- Work with client engineers on SDUI and React Server Components to improve performance and developer velocity for dynamic search layouts.
- Take accountability for the reliability and observability of the search funnel, from query planner refactors to real-time retrieval monitoring.
Benefits
- equity
- benefits
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
Number of Employees
501-1,000 employees
