Senior Search Engineer (Elasticsearch) (all genders) - Team Search Engine

Who we are

We operate the international online marketplaces of Kaufland: Several thousand sellers and millions of products make us one of the fastest growing online marketplaces. Ours is a dynamic corporate culture that merges a start-up mentality with the opportunities offered by a large corporation. We combine knowledge and many years of experience in e-commerce with flat hierarchies and a highly motivated team. 

We love flexibility! We offer you the best environment to work in a flexible and focussed way: You get to decide whether you want to work in one of our offices in Cologne // Darmstadt // Düsseldorf, but also have the opportunity to work remotely (within Germany) and choose the best of both. We want to offer you the most attractive workplace in e-commerce and maximum flexibility for your personal work-life balance. 

Day by day, our development team of about 400 experts pursues the goal of creating the best possible customer shopping experience for our online marketplace. To enrich the lives of our customers, we collaborate in cross-functional teams. Learn about how they are structured and more details about our product areas here: https://kaufland-ecommerce.com/en/team/tech-en/.

Your tasks – this is what awaits you in detail

• As a Senior Search Engineer (all genders) your goal is to bring our search to the next level for our customers
• Improving our relevance: Writing faster queries, improving data quality of ingested data and by making decisions on better vs. worse relevancy – you understand our searches inside out to make and share informed decisions
• Enriching our ingestion architecture: Consuming change events, updating Elasticsearch mappings and indexing into new fields, ensuring we are able to index into a single document from multiple sources
• Efficient integration: We are not alone in a huge stack like this – this can be enhanced by better mapping, faster retrieval of recently changed data or adding a field so we can boost our searches more efficiently
• Data modeling: Understanding its implications and effects on indexing and querying
• Performance enhancement: You are always on the look out, keeping our search speed as fast as possible
• Safety first: Everything you touch and design, you keep resiliency in mind as a key theme in a microservices environment. You know what circuit breakers and bulk heads are and only use caches when they make sense. You favor exponential backoff over CrashLoopBackoff – a lot!
• Our team tech stack consists of Kubernetes, gRPC, Typescript, the latest Node.js major version, Elasticsearch, a bit of MongoDB, Kafka and last but not least, we are using DataDog for monitoring

Your profile – this is what we expect from you

• You know how a (distributed) search engine works: scoring, pruning, caching, aggregating data, writing efficient queries against millions of e-commerce products in multiple languages
• You have gained extensive experience with one of the more well known search engines in the market, it does not matter which one
• You are hands-on and a team player: this is not a one person job – we run and operate our Elasticsearch cluster ourselves (e.g.: we just upgraded to the most recent Elasticsearch without any downtime using Ansible and Terraform)
• You build it, you run it: We monitor and debug our cluster, our applications and make sure we write well tested and reviewed code (our current language of choice is Typescript for our Microservices, we roll out our changes any time, any day – the same applies for rolling back)
• You don’t believe, you know: You do not guess and are well equipped with tangible facts and figures, we run A/B tests for validation and expect you to come up with proper metrics of success and failure for a search feature
• You are curious about the latest developments in tech and the search space in general (semantic search, NLP, LLMs, vectors, hybrid search, machine learning are all on our roadmap, especially with performance in mind)
• We’re a team and do not appreciate a bus factor of 1 – helping each other, leveling up each other and sharing knowledge is paramount for our success
• Being able to interpret the output of an Elasticsearch profiler or the Elasticsearch monitoring APIs is a huge plus

What we offer

• Create your own work-life balance: Work remotely or at one of our locations in Cologne, Darmstadt, Düsseldorf!
• Diversity and variety: An international environment with talents from over 65 different nations creates innovative and exciting perspectives
• Do you want to move to Germany? No problem – we offer you an attractive relocation package to give you a smooth start.
• Power meets dynamic: Flat hierarchies and start-up mentality meet the power of a big corporate group, providing you an agile and secure working environment
• Free choice of operating system: MacOS or Ubuntu Linux, it’s up to you
• We are team players: Our strong bond extends beyond our own team: we stay connected thanks to our many internal offerings, such as our digital onboarding program, our all-hands meetings and regular team and company events
• Mental well-being: We support you with various initiatives on your personal and professional well-being journey!
• Boost your growth: Benefit from our online language learning offers, our various in-house training offers as well as our automated 360-degree feedback to boost your personal and professional growth
• The future is digital: Develop the e-commerce of the future with us and work on a product with millions of users
• ‘Deutschlandticket’: We subsidise your train season ticket for more mobility
• Urban Sports Club: Get top deals for fitness, team sports, yoga and more
• Personal & team growth: We love flexibility in terms of working location, but we also believe that personal interactions are important. That’s why we organise company events, and cover the costs to bring you there and to other (approved) get-togethers with your peers. The same applies to conferences and other learning opportunities. We want everybody to grow personally and professionally, as a team and as a company

Check out our Principles & our blog for even more insights into our company culture!

Diversity at Kaufland e-commerce 
We welcome applications from everyone, regardless of skin colour, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, ethnic origin, religion and ideology. We are signatories to the Charta der Vielfalt (German Diversity Charter) – because we know that extraordinary things can only be achieved with diversity.