Staff Backend Engineer - Search Features & APIs (SABR)

About this role

Lead the technical direction, architecture, performance, and reliability of high-traffic backend services for product discovery. The role focuses on request orchestration and customer-facing APIs for search, autocomplete, browse, recommendations, and AI-agent integrations.

About the company

Constructor is an AI search and product discovery platform for ecommerce that helps retailers improve conversion through personalized search and recommendations.

The team

SABR team, responsible for product-discovery request processing, public configuration APIs, and the MCP layer.

Stack

What you'll do

• Own the architecture, performance, and reliability of one or more services.
• Lead the design of new systems and public APIs and evolve existing ones.
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar through design and code reviews.
• Partner with product, engineering, solutions, and support teams.
• Participate in on-call, lead incident response, and drive follow-up improvements.

What we're looking for

• Extensive Python experience.
• Experience building and operating high-traffic, low-latency backend services.
• Experience with observability and performance optimization in production.
• Experience designing and evolving customer-facing public APIs.
• Experience designing and implementing scalable service-oriented architectures.
• Track record leading projects spanning multiple engineers and quarters.
• Strong written communication, judgment, and comfort with ambiguity.
• Ownership of systems through production operations and on-call.

Nice to have

• AWS experience.
• Background in search, ranking, information retrieval, or e-commerce discovery.
• Exposure to AI/LLM infrastructure, MCP, or agent tooling.

Benefits

• Unlimited vacation; employees are encouraged to take at least three weeks per year.
• Fully remote work and a work-from-home stipend.
• Apple laptop provided.
• Annual training and development budget.
• Maternity and paternity leave for qualified employees.
• Stock options.
• Regular team offsites.