THE ROLE & THE TEAM

Join the Search Retrieval Team, the engine driving product and content discovery for Zalando. We build and operate the core search engine that connects over 62 million active customers across 29 markets with the products and content they love. Our Search Engine powers tens of millions of searchable content stored in multiple clusters and hundreds of indices distributed. Every content has ~4-10 embeddings that power our semantic understanding. We also integrate with LLMs models to power our query understanding and lexical search.

Our mission is to deliver a world-class, intelligent, scalable, and reliable Search Platform.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

As a Senior Search Engineer, you will be at the heart of our mission, tackling complex distributed systems problems at hyperscale. You will:

• Architect the Future of Search: Lead the design and implementation of our next-generation, AI-driven search engine, integrating Neural Search on top of our Elasticsearch platform.
• Build for Hyperscale: Modernize and scale our real-time data ingestion systems using technologies like Kafka and Flink to handle millions of updates.
• Drive Platform Innovation: Develop core platform capabilities that enable teams across Zalando to build rich, personalized discovery experiences for our customers.
• Drive Operational Excellence and Cost Efficiency: Lead platform-wide infrastructure projects, such as consolidating multi-lingual search indices, mitigating critical risks by migrating core services, and supporting system readiness for high-traffic events like Cyber Week.

WE’D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF:

• Deep Search Expertise: Extensive experience building large-scale, preferably e-commerce, search engines. While our stack is built on Elasticsearch, we highly value equivalent expertise in Lucene, OpenSearch, Solr, or other distributed search systems.