Backend Engineer

Summary

Join PartsTech as a Backend Software Engineer and contribute to the development and maintenance of our e-commerce search engine's backend. You will be responsible for building and optimizing search algorithms, APIs, and data pipelines. This role requires proficiency in Kotlin, JVM, and experience with search engine technologies like OpenSearch and ElasticSearch. Familiarity with various databases, caching solutions, and microservices architecture is also essential. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure high performance, scalability, and reliability of the search engine. PartsTech offers a remote-first work environment and a commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering
• Ideally proficient in Kotlin, JVM, Java Class Library for backend development
• Strong experience with OpenSearch, ElasticSearch, and possibly Solr, or Algolia for indexing and retrieving search data
• Familiarity with query optimization, indexing strategies, and search relevance tuning
• Proficiency with databases (both SQL and NoSQL), such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, or DynamoDB
• Knowledge of caching solutions like Redis or Memcached to improve search response times
• Understanding of data pipelines and ETL processes to ingest and process product or user data in near-real-time
• Experience developing and implementing search algorithms for ranking, relevance scoring, and personalization
• Ability to design, develop, and optimize RESTful APIs or GraphQL for handling search requests and responses
• Experience with microservices architecture and the ability to break down the search service into scalable, manageable components
• Strong focus on performance and scalability to handle large numbers of search queries and rapid response times
• Proficiency in monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana) and log analysis to identify performance bottlenecks
• Understanding of API security best practices, such as authentication, rate-limiting, and data protection
• Experience with distributed systems to ensure high availability and fault tolerance of the search engine
• Proficient in Git for version control
• Familiar with CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI) to automate testing and deployment pipelines

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain the search backend
• Develop and maintain the backend search engine and ensure it meets high standards of reliability and performance
• Implement search-related backend features like indexing, filtering, faceting, and ranking algorithms, both inside a third-party search engine and outside one (in custom code using efficient data structures and algorithms and possibly natural language processing and information retrieval techniques)
• Optimize search relevance and ranking
• Adjust search relevance and ranking algorithms to improve search result quality, considering factors like user engagement and conversion
• Collaborate with data scientists to experiment with and deploy ranking signals or personalization
• Performance optimization and scaling
• Optimize the search infrastructure to handle a growing number of products and users with low latency
• Implement caching and load balancing to ensure fast and consistent search responses
• Data integration and management
• Set up and maintain data pipelines for product information, user behavior, and search logs to keep search indices updated in real time
• Work with database and data engineering teams to ensure that data is structured and stored efficiently for rapid access
• API development and maintenance
• Design and maintain APIs for the frontend team to access search results, facets, and filters
• Ensure APIs are secure, scalable, and documented, facilitating easy integration by frontend engineers
• Monitoring and troubleshooting
• Implement monitoring and alerting for search service performance and availability
• Identify and resolve issues that affect search quality or uptime, such as data indexing problems or server latency
• Continuous improvement & experimentation
• Participate in A/B tests or experiments to improve search algorithms and evaluate user engagement with search features
• Keep up-to-date with advancements in search technology, machine learning, and NLP that can enhance the search experience
• Collaboration and knowledge sharing
• Work closely with frontend, product, and UX teams to align on search functionality and user experience goals

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced Degree (Master's or PhD) in Computer Science, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, or Machine Learning
• Other backend development experience such with as Node.js or Python
• Familiarity with Go or Rust for high-performance requirements
• Knowledge of vector search and embedding-based search for personalized or semantic search
• Knowledge of machine learning for search (e.g., natural language processing, embeddings)

Benefits

Remote-first work environment