Senior Search Engineer Elasticsearch

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! You have the freedom to choose whether you want to work remotely (within Germany) or at one of our offices in Cologne, Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, or in our co‑working space in Berlin. You decide what works best for you!

Day by day, our Tech & Product Team of about 400 experts pursues the goal of creating the best possible customer shopping experience for our online marketplace. Through innovative technical developments, they not only create an outstanding shopping experience but also lay the foundation for an optimal selling experience for our sellers.

• As a Senior Search Engineer (all genders) – Elasticsearch, 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 modelling:
  Understanding its implications and effects on indexing and querying
• Performance enhancement:
  You are always on the lookout, keeping our search speed as fast as possible
• Safety first:
  With everything you touch and design, you keep resiliency in mind as a key theme in a microservice environment. You know what circuit breakers and bulk heads are and only use caches when they make sense. You favour exponential backoff over Crash Loop Backoff .
• Our team tech stack consists of Kubernetes, gRPC, Typescript, the latest Node.js major version, Elasticsearch, a bit of Mongo
  
  DB, Kafka and last but not least, we are using Data Dog for monitoring

• You have relevant experience of 7+ years as a Search Engineer
• You know how a (distributed) search engine works and have gained experience with one of the more well known search engines in the market
• You bring the skills to run, monitor, debug, and operate our Elasticsearch cluster and applications and always write well tested and reviewed code
• You don't guess – you 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:
  You have the desire to help others, share your knowledge and mentor others
• You are willing to go the extra mile to make your team successful, you give honest feedback, able to discuss, commit and execute
• You have excellent written and spoken English skills

• Create your own work‑life balance: You have the flexibility to choose between working remotely (within Germany) or from one of our locations in Cologne, Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, or our co‑working space in Berlin!
• Do you want to move to Germany? No problem – we offer you an attractive relocation package to give you a smooth start.
• Urban Sports Club and RSG Group Fitness Studios: Get top deals for fitness, swimming, yoga and more
• Mental Well‑Being: We support you on your well‑being journey with special offerings such as Instahelp, the digital platform for online psychological counseling
• Vacation &…