Senior ML Backend Engineer - Search & Recommendations

Job description

the employer is hiring a Senior ML Backend Engineer - Search & Recommendations for the Makkah region. You will own online systems that transform catalogue changes into ranked results for shoppers, including search, retrieval, recommendation serving, streaming data freshness, and experiments. Build and run query and recommendation serving: retrieval, score fusion, filtering, caching. Maintain latency budgets with double-digit‑millisecond p95 for search‑as‑you‑type and design graceful degradation. Implement experiment plumbing with shadow traffic, A/B assignment, guardrail metrics, and rollback. Build CDC pipelines into search indexes and feature stores, keep embeddings fresh, and perform zero‑downtime reindexing of multi‑million document collections. Log features to turn production traffic into training data. Ship changes to product backends, coordinate reviews, release windows, and production ownership. Provide monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and share on‑call duties for shipped services

Requirements

• Proficient in Python
• experience with Git
• expertise in plumbing
• 5+ years building backend or platform systems in production
• 2+ years operating a production search engine such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Typesense, or Vespa
• low‑latency services under real traffic with explained p95
• streaming ingestion using Kafka, Debezium or similar CDC with idempotent backfills
• strong TypeScript skills
• shipped changes through A/B tests and staged rollouts
• daily use of agentic coding tools like Claude Code

Skills