Staff Search Engineer (all genders) | Elasticsearch

Permanent Contract, Full-or Part-Time, Remote or Cologne / Düsseldorf / Darmstadt / Berlin

Who we are

We are the tech powerhouse behind Kaufland’s international online marketplaces and a company within the Schwarz Group. Driven by a start-up mentality and working on an equal footing within flat hierarchies, we develop the best marketplace solutions for our customers, sellers and partners. #FromEuropeForEurope
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. Learn more about our division, areas, and cross-functional teams here!

Your tasks – this is what awaits you in detail

• As a Staff Search Engineer (all genders) 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 CrashLoopBackoff - a lot!
• Our team tech stack consists of Kubernetes, gRPC, Typescript, the latest Node.js major version, Elasticsearch, a bit of MongoDB, Kafka and last but not least, we are using DataDog for monitoring

Your profile – this is what we expect from you

• 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 believe, you know: You do not guess and 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

What we offer

• 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 in Berlin!
• 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 & Sabbatical: Enjoy 30 days of vacation per year and the opportunity to take a sabbatical once you have been part of the team for a certain period!
• Option for Pluxee restaurant vouchers: Buy Pluxee vouchers through us and benefit from tax-advantaged meal allowances!
• ‘Deutschlandticket’: We subsidize your train season ticket for more mobility
• Employee Discount: You will receive a monthly coupon for Kaufland.de
• Free choice of hardware: Mac or Lenovo, it's up to you
• Boost your growth: Benefit from our online language learning programs, diverse in-house training, and our automated 360-degree feedback
• This is who we are: Our dynamic culture combines flat hierarchies, a start-up mentality, an international team of over 65 nationalities, and the strength of the Schwarz Group to provide you an agile and secure working environment.
• We are team players: From day one, you will connect not only with your team but also with others through our digital onboarding journey, the buddy program, and regular team and company events, all-hands meetings, powerful mornings, and much more!

Check out our Principles & our blog for even more insights into our company culture!

Diversity at Kaufland e-commerce

We welcome applications from everyone, regardless of skin colour, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, ethnic origin, religion and ideology. We are signatories to the Charta der Vielfalt (German Diversity Charter) – because we know that extraordinary things can only be achieved with diversity. Read more here! When applying, you can optionally include your pronouns in your resume.
Why are you the perfect fit for this position?
Don't bother with cover letters - we're interested in facts and figures! Feel free to share your Github profile with us in your application.
As we have very international teams, we would highly appreciate it to receive your CV or profile link in English.
We are looking forward to your application!
Kaufland e-commerce Services GmbH & Co. KG
Postal address:
Habsburgerring 2
50674 Köln

Your contact person: Verena Schilmann