{"id":4077699,"url":"https://alion.io/job/apify-senior-search-and-recommendations-engineer-store","title":"Senior Search and Recommendations Engineer, Store","company":{"id":6237,"name":"Apify","domain":"apify.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/apify-technologies-s-r-o","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":12,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":117,"computed_at":"2026-11-11T05:49:22Z"}},"role":"Industrial Engineering","role_family":"Industrial Engineering","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Prague, Czech Republic"],"countries":["CZ"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":4,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"A/B Testing","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EC2","optional":true},{"name":"Amazon EKS","optional":true},{"name":"Amazon S3","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"AWS Lambda","optional":true},{"name":"Claude","optional":true},{"name":"CloudFormation","optional":true},{"name":"Copilot","optional":true},{"name":"Cursor","optional":true},{"name":"Cypress","optional":true},{"name":"Docusaurus","optional":true},{"name":"DynamoDB","optional":true},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":true},{"name":"Gemini","optional":true},{"name":"GitHub","optional":true},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":true},{"name":"Google Workspace","optional":true},{"name":"Grafana","optional":true},{"name":"Helm","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Kanban","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"Nest.JS","optional":true},{"name":"Next.js","optional":true},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":true},{"name":"PagerDuty","optional":true},{"name":"Playwright","optional":true},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":true},{"name":"React.js","optional":true},{"name":"Redis","optional":true},{"name":"Sentry","optional":true},{"name":"Slack","optional":true},{"name":"Storybook","optional":true},{"name":"styled-components","optional":true},{"name":"Terraform","optional":true},{"name":"Vitest","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-11T13:32:28Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-11","last_verified_at":"2026-11-11T16:00:58Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Apify is the largest marketplace of trusted tools for AI that automate work on the web. Thousands of Actors get web data, generate leads, monitor social media, track competitors, and integrate with existing apps and agents. Actors are created by a global community of builders who earn from them, while Apify manages infrastructure, billing, and distribution. Learn more at apify.com.\nJoin us to help people put the web to work. Apify can find missing children, protect consumers from fake discounts across the EU, and feed data to AI chatbots.\nApify is looking for a Senior Search and Recommendations Engineer to join the Discovery team, which owns how people and agents find the right Actor in Apify Store. The foundations are already in place: recommendations, a categorization system that powers Store filtering, LLM-based offline evals, relevance metrics, and A/B testing. With the catalog growing by more than 20% month over month, we need someone who can keep search and recommendations working for both users and builders as it scales. Discovery is one of the highest-leverage problems at Apify: when users and agents land on the right tool, activation, onboarding, and retention follow.\nWhat you'll be working on:\nOwn Store search relevance end to end: retrieval, ranking, and query understanding. Spot where today's setup falls short and decide what to fix first.\n\nGet more out of our Recombee setup: tune scenarios, business rules, and signals so recommendations stay relevant for each user, context, and use case.\n\nSharpen our existing evaluation stack (LLM-based evals, relevance metrics, and A/B tests) so it catches regressions early and gives the team results it can trust.\n\nKeep discovery healthy as the catalog continues to grow, refining the signals, ranking, and categorization so they hold up as new Actors arrive.\n\nEvolve the Actor category taxonomy and the classification system behind Store filtering so every Actor stays findable by browsing and by search.\n\nMake Apify Store work for AI agents as well as people, with retrieval and query understanding that return the right Actor on the first call.\n\nShape technical direction for search and recommendations at Apify, and build the team's expertise in both.\n\nWho we're looking for:\nMust-haves:\n4+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years owning search or recommendation relevance in production at a marketplace, e-commerce, or content platform, ideally one with a fast-growing catalog.\n\nJudgment that comes from having done this before: you can look at an existing search, ranking, or recommendation setup and tell where it's headed for trouble, and which problems to leave alone.\n\nHands-on experience in search relevance: ranking functions, query understanding, filtering, and sorting.\n\nExperience configuring and tuning recommendation systems, including cold-start and sparse-data problems.\n\nExperience evolving category taxonomies and classification for a large, growing catalog, whether by rules, models, or LLMs.\n\nRigor in measuring relevance: you know which metrics and evals to trust, and you've used A/B tests to change product decisions.\n\nStrong backend skills for shipping production services and data pipelines in TypeScript/Node.js.\n\nNice-to-haves:\nEmbeddings, hybrid lexical and vector retrieval, and LLMs applied to retrieval, re-ranking, query rewriting, or evaluation (LLM-as-judge).\n\nEnough React/TypeScript to ship changes to Store search and listing pages yourself.\n\nAbility to explain ranking trade-offs to product, design, and data colleagues, and to turn \"help users find the right tool\" into measurable goals.\n\nOur tech stack:\nFrontend: React.js, styled-components, Storybook, Chromatic, Cypress, Playwright\n\nBackend: TypeScript/Node.js, Nest.js, Next.js, Docusaurus, Vitest\n\nInfra: AWS Compute (Kubernetes (EKS), EC2, Lambda), Helm, Terraform, CloudFormation, MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB, S3, GitHub Actions\n\nMonitoring: Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Mezmo, Sentry, PagerDuty\n\nTools: GitHub, Notion, Google Workspace, Slack\n\nOS, code editor, and AI assistant of your choice (Claude premium with unlimited tokens, GH Copilot, Cursor, Gemini, or JetBrains AI)\n\nProcess: kanban, code reviews, tests, automating whatever we can, and deploying multiple times per day.\n\nRole-specific tools: Recombee, MongoDB Atlas, and GrowthBook.\nWhat we expect from you in the first 6 months:\nBy the end of the first 3 months, we expect you to:\nAudit current Store search, recommendations, and categorization, and present where you see the biggest risks and opportunities.\n\nReview our evals and relevance metrics, and close the gaps that would let a bad ranking change slip through.\n\nShip your first relevance or recommendation improvement to production, validated by an A/B test.\n\nShip and debug changes across the discovery stack: Store frontend, scoring and ranking services, Recombee, and the data pipelines behind them.\n\nBy the end of the first 6 months, we expect you to:\nBe the go-to expert for search and recommendations, and set the team’s technical direction.\n\nShip changes that measurably improve a core discovery metric, such as search success, first Actor run, or activation.\n\nDeliver a significant upgrade to retrieval, filtering, or ranking, live in production.\n\nShip improvements to the category taxonomy that matches how users and agents search.\n\nImprove agent-facing discovery so AI agents find the right Actor more reliably, measured by first-week retention.\n\nWhy should you work at Apify?\nSpace, support, and autonomy for personal growth, with a direct impact on our success\n\nFull-time position in Prague at our amazing office located in 100Yards\n\nOption to work remotely\n\nFlexible working hours\n\nNobody counts holidays as long as the work gets done\n\nUnlimited Claude for every Apifier. We don't count tokens. Just use them well\n\nStock options and profit sharing\n\nFree Apify credits for your friends and family to try the platform\n\nFree Multisport card\n\nRegular massages in the office, mostly covered by Apify\n\nWe welcome pets, kids, and bikes at the office\n\nEpic team buildings and offsites with biking, canoeing, and other adventures\n\nSolid education and training budget, conference tickets, internal \"Eat & Learn\" sessions, and the possibility to work across teams\n\nGenerous hardware budget\n\nFree lunches every day when working from the office\n\nUnlimited supply of & and snacks\n\nFree entry to the wonderful Prague Zoo\n\nPing-pong, chess, PS5, foosball league after lunch\n\nFor more details about Apify and what it's like to work with us, see our Careers page.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6581,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":4,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Flexible schedule","Stock options"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Czech Republic","iso":"CZ","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Web Scraping & Proxy Networks"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-11T16:00:58Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":117,"reasons":["conf:2","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-11T18:26:16Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/apify-senior-search-and-recommendations-engineer-store","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/apify-senior-search-and-recommendations-engineer-store.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-11T18:26:16Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":35409,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-12T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":6237},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=6237"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fapify-senior-search-and-recommendations-engineer-store"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fapify-senior-search-and-recommendations-engineer-store"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fapify-senior-search-and-recommendations-engineer-store"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/apify-senior-search-and-recommendations-engineer-store\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fapify-senior-search-and-recommendations-engineer-store"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":4077699}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"apify.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":4077699},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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