Staff Search Engineer

About Us

We operate the international online marketplaces of Kaufland. Several thousand sellers and millions of products make us one of the fastest-growing online marketplaces.

Our dynamic corporate culture merges a start-up mentality with the opportunities offered by a large corporation. We combine deep e-commerce knowledge and years of experience with flat hierarchies and a highly motivated team.

Flexibility & Work Environment

We love flexibility! You decide where you want to work:

• At one of our offices in Cologne, Darmstadt, or Düsseldorf
• Remotely within Germany
• A mix of both – you choose what works best for your work-life balance

Our goal is to offer you the most attractive workplace in e-commerce with maximum flexibility.

About the Tech Team

Every day, our team of 400+ developers works to create the best shopping experience for our customers. We collaborate in cross-functional teams to enrich our customers’ lives.

Learn more about our tech structure and product areas.

Your Tasks – What Awaits You

As a Staff Search Engineer (all genders) – Elasticsearch, your mission is to elevate our search functionality:

• Improving relevance: Writing faster queries, improving data quality, and making informed relevancy decisions
• Enriching ingestion architecture: Working with change events, updating mappings, indexing from multiple sources
• Efficient integration: Enhancing mappings, retrieval performance, and boosting search functionality
• Data modelling: Understanding its effect on indexing and querying
• Performance enhancement: Ensuring high-speed search performance
• Resilience: Designing with resiliency in mind (circuit breakers, caches, exponential backoff, etc.)

Our tech stack includes: Kubernetes, gRPC, Typescript, Node.js, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Kafka, and DataDog

Your Profile – What We Expect

• Experience with distributed search engines like Elasticsearch
• Ability to run, monitor, debug, and operate Elasticsearch clusters and applications
• Fact-based decision making with metrics, A/B testing, and success tracking
• Curiosity about new technologies in search (semantic search, NLP, LLMs, vectors, ML, etc.)
• Team player mentality – mentoring, collaboration, and knowledge sharing
• Commitment, honest feedback, and strong communication skills
• Excellent spoken and written English

What We Offer

• Work-life balance: Flexible remote work (within Germany) or at our offices in Cologne, Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, or Berlin co-working space
• Relocation support: Attractive relocation package for moving to Germany
• Health & wellness: Urban Sports Club, RSG Group, and digital mental health support via Instahelp
• Time off: 30 vacation days per year and sabbatical options
• Meal benefits: Pluxee restaurant vouchers with tax advantages
• Mobility: Subsidised Deutschlandticket (public transport)
• Corporate perks: Discounts with top brands
• Tech choice: MacOS or Ubuntu Linux – your choice
• Learning & development: Online language programs, internal training, conference access, 360° feedback, and team workshops
• Inclusive culture: 65+ nationalities, flat hierarchies, and part of the Schwarz Group for stability and agility
• Onboarding & team spirit: Buddy program, onboarding journey, events, all-hands, and more

Check out our Principles & blog for more insights into our culture.

Diversity at Kaufland e-commerce

We welcome applications from everyone – regardless of skin colour, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, ethnic origin, religion, or ideology.

We proudly support the Charta der Vielfalt (German Diversity Charter) because we believe diversity leads to extraordinary results.