{"id":2123984,"url":"https://alion.io/job/constructor-staff-backend-engineer-search-features-apis-sabr","title":"Staff Backend Engineer - Search Features & APIs (SABR)","company":{"id":716274,"name":"Constructor","domain":"constructor.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/constructor-3","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":94,"open_postings":40,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0.075,"time_to_fill_p50_days":75,"computed_at":"2026-10-15T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["DE"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":110000,"max":130000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":130000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-08T20:38:39Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-08","last_verified_at":"2026-10-15T20:29:33Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":7,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":6},"description":"About us\nLaunched in 2019, Constructor is an AI-first e-commerce search and discovery platform that helps shoppers find the right products at the right time and enables leading global e-commerce brands to drive meaningful revenue and conversion gains.\nAbout the team\nThe SABR team owns the top layer of request processing for product discovery. We own the service that first receives product discovery requests (autocomplete, search, browse & recommendations) & executes the entire business logic that drives product discovery. That service also functions as a gateway to parse incoming user requests, orchestrate calls across the internal services that do the ranking and retrieval, interpret their responses, and assemble the final response the customer sees. We also own the public configuration APIs customers use to control how discovery behaves, and the MCP layer that exposes all of it to AI agents.\nOur team owns both platform & product components: Because of the positioning of our services, we take part in every architectural decision of our core product offering. At the same time, our goals are heavily influenced by direct customer feedback, because all product discovery-related features are either implemented in or integrated with our services.\nAll of our services are public APIs, so interface design and backward compatibility are a constant part of the job. But most of our attention goes to keeping them fast and up: we serve up to 15k RPS, fan out to many internal services on every request, and are expected to stay available and degrade gracefully when any of them fails or slows down.\nThe work is distributed systems in practice rather than in theory: request orchestration, failure isolation, caching, latency budgets, capacity planning, and the observability to know what is actually happening in production. The team is small enough that engineers own problems end to end, from design through on-call.\nAbout you\nYou're a staff-level engineer who wants to own systems, not tickets. You've built high-traffic, low-latency Python services and carried the pager for them. You think in trade-offs: latency versus cost, flexibility versus a public API that customers can't afford to see break, the fix that ships this week versus the architecture that has to last two years. You can lead work that spans several engineers and several quarters, you enjoy mentoring others, and you're fine when a problem shows up half-defined. You don't mind being the one who reads the spec for some unfamiliar protocol, works out how it fits, and designs an integration that holds up at scale. You change your mind when someone has a better argument, you make the people around you better, and you still care about your code long after it merges.\nWhat you will do\nOwn the technical direction of one or more of our services - architecture, performance, and reliability.\n\nLead design of new systems and public APIs, and the evolution of existing ones as traffic and feature scope grow.\n\nRaise the engineering bar through design and code review, and mentor mid and senior engineers into owning bigger scopes.\n\nPartner with product, other engineering teams, and solutions/support to shape what we build and to represent search constraints and trade-offs honestly.\n\nTake part in on-call for the systems you own, and lead incident response and follow-through when things break.\n\nWhat we are looking for\nTechnical\nSubstantial experience building and operating high-traffic, low-latency backend services in production.\n\nExtensive Python knowledge (our primary language).\n\nExperience with observability and performance work in live systems.\n\nExperience designing and evolving public APIs that external customers depend on.\n\nExperience designing & implementing scalable service-oriented architectures.\n\nBeyond the code\nTrack record of leading projects that span multiple engineers and quarters.\n\nInfluence without authority, and willingness to change your position when someone has a better argument.\n\nClear written communication - design docs, RFCs, postmortems.\n\nGood judgment about trade-offs and scope.\n\nComfort with ambiguity and loosely defined problems.\n\nOwnership that extends past merge, to how the system behaves in production.\n\nNice to have\nExperience with AWS\n\nBackground in search, ranking, information retrieval, or e-commerce product discovery.\n\nExposure to AI/LLM-facing infrastructure (MCP, agent tooling, or similar).\n\nBenefits\nUnlimited vacation time - we strongly encourage all of our employees take at least 3 weeks per year\nFully remote team - choose where you live\nWork from home stipend! We want you to have the resources you need to set up your home office\nApple laptops provided for new employees\nTraining and development budget for every employee, refreshed each year\nMaternity & Paternity leave for qualified employees\nWork with smart people who will help you grow and make a meaningful impact\nBase salary: $110k-$130k USD, depending on knowledge, skills, experience, and interview results\nStock options - offered in addition to the base salary\nRegular team offsites to connect and collaborate\nDiversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Constructor\nAt Constructor.io we are committed to cultivating a work environment that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome individuals of all backgrounds and provide equal opportunities to all applicants regardless of their education, diversity of opinion, race, color, religion, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status or affiliation in any other protected group.\nStudies have shown that women and people of color may be less likely to apply for jobs unless they meet every one of the qualifications listed. Our primary interest is in finding the best candidate for the job. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all of our listed qualifications.\nHow we handle your data. By submitting this application, you acknowledge that Constructor will collect and process the personal data you provide for the purpose of evaluating your candidacy for this role. If you are not selected, we will retain your data for a limited period as described in our Recruitment Privacy Notice. After that period your data will be deleted or anonymized.\nHow we handle your data. By submitting this application, you acknowledge that Constructor will collect and process the personal data you provide for the purpose of evaluating your candidacy for this role. If you are not selected, we will retain your data for a limited period as described in our Recruitment Privacy Notice. 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