Senior Search Engineer (Elasticsearch) (all genders) - Team Search Engine

2024-09-26
Germany
Kaufland e-commerce
Employment details
Permanent Contract, Full-or Part-Time, Remote or Cologne / Düsseldorf / Darmstadt
Info
Who we are
We operate the international online marketplaces of Kaufland: Several thousand sellers and millions of products make us one of the fastest growing online marketplaces. Ours is a dynamic corporate culture that merges a start-up mentality with the opportunities offered by a large corporation. We combine knowledge and many years of experience in e-commerce with flat hierarchies and a highly motivated team.
We love flexibility! We offer you the best environment to work in a flexible and focussed way: You get to decide whether you want to work in one of our offices in Cologne // Darmstadt // Düsseldorf, but also have the opportunity to work remotely (within Germany) and choose the best of both. We want to offer you the most attractive workplace in e-commerce and maximum flexibility for your personal work-life balance.
Day by day, our development team of about 400 experts pursues the goal of creating the best possible customer shopping experience for our online marketplace. To enrich the lives of our customers, we collaborate in cross-functional teams. Learn about how they are structured and more details about our product areas here: https://kaufland-ecommerce.com/en/team/tech-en/.
Tasks
Building, developing and enabling high performing teams who build awesome products is the main responsibility for our Engineering Managers. This is the entry position in our Engineering Management Career Path and one possible follow up position for Senior Engineers who want to move into Management. This position reports to a Head of Product Engineering.

Your tasks – this is what awaits you in detail

As a Junior Engineering Manager (all genders) your goal is to bring our search to the next level for our customers by enabling and empowering our experienced engineering team

You will be responsible for the engineers of one product team in a you-build-it-you-run-it environment
To understand the teams and our products needs inside out, you work alongside the search engine engineering team and are still very hands on


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
People management: You are responsible for advancing your team members’ skills and careers and inspiring them through purpose
Safety first: Everything you touch and design, you keep resiliency in mind as a key theme in a microservices 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

Profile
Your profile – this is what we expect from you

You know how a (distributed) search engine works and have gained extensive 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)
You possess the ability to interpret the output of an Elasticsearch profiler or the Elasticsearch monitoring APIs is a huge plus
We're a team and do not appreciate a bus factor of 1: You have the desire to help others, share your knowledge, mentor other engineers and enable them to grow and succeed
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

Benefits
What we offer

Create your own work-life balance: Work remotely (within Germany) or at one of our locations in Cologne, Darmstadt, Düsseldorf!
Diversity and variety: An international environment with talents from over 65 different nations creates innovative and exciting perspectives
Do you want to move to Germany? No problem – we offer you an attractive relocation package to give you a smooth start.
Power meets dynamic: Flat hierarchies and start-up mentality meet the power of a big corporate group, providing you an agile and secure working environment
Free choice of operating system: MacOS or Ubuntu Linux, it's up to you
We are team players: Our strong bond extends beyond our own team: we stay connected thanks to our many internal offerings, such as our digital onboarding program, our all-hands meetings and regular team and company events
Mental well-being: We support you with various initiatives on your personal and professional well-being journey!
Boost your growth : Benefit from our online language learning offers, our various in-house training offers as well as our automated 360-degree feedback to boost your personal and professional growth
The future is digital: Develop the e-commerce of the future with us and work on a product with millions of users
‘ Deutschlandticket ’: We subsidise your train season ticket for more mobility
Urban Sports Club: Get top deals for fitness, team sports, yoga and more
Personal & team growth: We love flexibility in terms of working location, but we also believe that personal interactions are important. That’s why we organise company events, and cover the costs to bring you there and to other (approved) get-togethers with your peers. The same applies to conferences and other learning opportunities. We want everybody to grow personally and professionally, as a team and as a company 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.
Your application
Why are you the perfect fit for this position?Don't bother with cover letters - we're interested in facts and figures!
How would you like to be addressed?Feel free to add the following pronouns "she/her", "him/he" or "they/them" optionally (e.g. after your name) in your CV.
As we have very international teams, we would highly appreciate it to receive your CV or profile link in English.
Contact Person
Your contact person: Alina AsmusKaufland e-commerce Services GmbH & Co. KG
Postal address:Habsburgerring 250674 Köln
We are looking forward to your application!
About the company
We operate Kaufland’s international online marketplaces. Behind the scenes you’ll find a team more than 850 strong, made up of international, inspired, intelligent minds. We work remotely within Germany, as well as in-person at our locations in Cologne, Darmstadt, and Düsseldorf. Our goal? Keep improving our customers’ digital shopping experience every day.