Senior Backend Engineer - Search (all genders)

ABOUT YOU is one of Europe’s fastest growing e-commerce companies. Based in Hamburg and Berlin, we operate at the intersection of fashion and technology. Our mission is to rethink online shopping and make it personal and seamless. This takes more than good ideas. It takes people who take initiative and challenge the status quo. We believe in flat hierarchies, direct communication, and pragmatic decisions. No long approval chains. Just ownership, trust, and clear responsibility. We work hard, but we also believe in enjoying the ride together - over team lunches, afterwork drinks, company events, or a quick coffee in between meetings. If this sounds like you, ABOUT YOU could be the right place to bring in your perspective.

Responsibilities

Develop the search engine behind ABOUT YOU, covering query understanding, entity resolution, and semantic vector search in Node.js/TypeScript; Blend OpenSearch relevance, embedding similarity, and behavioral re-ranking signals into unified search results; Build search-index pipelines (entities, synonyms, k-NN product vectors) streaming data from BigQuery into OpenSearch; Integrate LLMs and embedding models (Gemini, Vertex AI) under tight latency budgets with caching and fallback layers; Guard search relevance using golden lists, regression suites, and continuous A/B experiments; Shape architecture alongside our Tech Lead and collaborate closely with data analysts, engineers, and product managers

Requirements

You love investigating the "why" behind search outcomes and turning those findings into actionable technical improvements; 5+ years of experience building scalable, low-latency backend APIs (Node.js/TypeScript preferred, or fast-converting from Java, Go, or Kotlin); Real depth in Elasticsearch/OpenSearch (mappings, custom analyzers, percolators, scoring functions) beyond just basic query clients; Strong algorithmic intuition for ranked data (merging, deduplication, score blending, and latency trade-offs); You're excited to bridge backend engineering and ML by serving model scores, embeddings, or LLM features in production; Fluent English communication skills and a pragmatic, data-curious mindset

Nice to have

IR/NLP fundamentals (tokenization, multilingual search, relevance evaluation frameworks); Vector search experience (k-NN/HNSW indices, SigLIP embeddings, recall vs. latency tuning); LLM engineering (prompt caching, timeout budgets, Datadog LLM Observability); Familiarity with BigQuery, dbt, or Dagster pipelines