Senior Backend Engineer - Search Features & APIs (Remote - Worldwide)

This is a senior backend role on a small team at an AI-driven product search and discovery platform serving large e-commerce brands. The team owns the top-level request service that handles autocomplete, search, browse and recommendation requests, coordinates calls to internal ranking and retrieval services, and exposes public configuration APIs and an interface layer for AI agents. The service handles up to about 15,000 requests per second, so speed, uptime and graceful degradation are central concerns. Engineers own work from design through on-call.

What you'll do

• Own the design and delivery of features and components in a high-traffic Python service.
• Design and evolve public API endpoints while keeping backward compatibility for customers.
• Find latency and failure hotspots, add the metrics, logs and traces needed to see them, and fix them.
• Lead design and code reviews and mentor mid-level engineers.
• Work with product, support and other engineering teams to turn customer needs into technical solutions.
• Take part in on-call for owned systems and lead incident response and follow-up.

What you need

• Solid experience building and running backend services in production, ideally high-traffic or low-latency ones.
• Extensive Python experience.
• Hands-on experience with observability and debugging performance problems in live systems.
• Experience designing and evolving public APIs that external customers rely on, and building scalable service-oriented architectures.
• Track record of leading projects end to end, with clear written communication for design docs and postmortems.
• Nice to have: AWS experience, background in search or information retrieval, and exposure to LLM or agent tooling.

Open to applicants anywhere in the world.

How to apply

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