Senior AI Search Engineer

About commercetools

Real innovation starts with a strong foundation, and at commercetools, that comes from the perfect balance of our product and our people.

Behind every leap forward is a collective of builders, explorers, doers, makers, and problem-solvers.The kind of people who not only pioneered a more flexible approach to commerce architecture but also shaped the culture of experimentation that approach unlocked. Together, they are the engine of commerce innovation today.

At commercetools, we power the next era of commerce for our customers. 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.

Here, the best idea wins, not the loudest voice. You will have the tools, trust, and space to not only build the future of commerce but to build your own.

Your Impact

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.

Search is changing shape. Shoppers type full sentences instead of keywords, and increasingly the client calling our API is an AI agent rather than a person. 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. You would join that work at every layer, from query understanding down to the vector index and the cost of a single query.

You will:

• Design and implement search functionalities in a PaaS ecommerce Scala backend.
• Develop in a scalable and multi-tenant architecture.
• Analyze user needs and discuss technical approaches.
• Test software components regarding usability, functionality, and performance, and work closely with Product Management and DevOps.
• Take part in on-call rotations 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. 

What Sets You Apart

You're a creative problem-solver who is wired to find solutions. You confidently dive into complex challenges and have a talent for making them simple for others. Your curiosity drives you to constantly grow and contribute to an environment of trust and teamwork.

Great ideas come from many paths, and your unique perspective matters more than checking every box. What matters most is the mindset you bring to the work.

You bring:

• 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer working in search.
• Experience with building search solutions on top of engines, such as Elasticsearch (preferred), Solr, OpenSearch, or similar.
• Aspiration to constantly improve yourself and learn new technologies, concepts, etc.
• Fluent English communication skills to work in international teams.
• AI Aptitude: A genuine curiosity for using AI tools to work smarter and more effectively, paired with a drive to learn and put them into practice in your role.

Nice to Have:

• Experience using modern search stacks and strategies to optimize search relevance (Vector and Hybrid Search, Learning to rank, Re-ranker)
• Experience developing REST APIs and knowledge of scalable event-driven architectures (incl., queues, notification topics, sharding, replication, load balancing, and failover).
• Experience working with Scala or other functional programming languages.
• Experience with infrastructure work and other technologies like Helm, Kubernetes, and Rust.