Senior Backend Engineer - Search & Discovery

Location: Hamburg or Berlin, Germany

Salary: €70,000–€85,000 per year

Company

hirify.global is a European e-commerce company combining fashion and technology to create personalized online shopping experiences.

What you will do

• Develop the search engine covering query understanding, entity resolution, and semantic vector search using Node.js and TypeScript.
• Combine OpenSearch relevance, embedding similarity, and behavioral re-ranking signals into unified search results.
• Build search-index pipelines for entities, synonyms, and k-NN product vectors, streaming data from BigQuery into OpenSearch.
• Integrate Gemini and Vertex AI models with caching and fallback layers under strict latency budgets.
• Maintain search relevance through golden lists, regression suites, and continuous A/B experiments.
• Shape the architecture with the Tech Lead and collaborate with data analysts, engineers, and product managers.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building scalable, low-latency backend APIs.
• Strong Node.js and TypeScript experience, or the ability to transition quickly from Java, Go, or Kotlin.
• Deep Elasticsearch or OpenSearch expertise, including mappings, custom analyzers, percolators, and scoring functions.
• Strong algorithmic understanding of ranked data, including merging, deduplication, score blending, and latency trade-offs.
• Experience 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, multilingual search, and relevance evaluation frameworks.
• Vector search experience with k-NN/HNSW indices, SigLIP embeddings, and recall-versus-latency tuning.
• LLM engineering experience, including prompt caching, timeout budgets, and Datadog LLM Observability.
• Familiarity with BigQuery, dbt, or Dagster pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Flat hierarchies, direct communication, pragmatic decision-making, and clear ownership.
• Inclusive environment that values different backgrounds and perspectives.
• Team lunches, afterwork drinks, company events, and informal opportunities to connect.
• Additional employee perks are provided through the company benefits program.

Hiring process

• Apply online through the career page.
• The hiring team will follow up after reviewing the application.