{"id":3330352,"url":"https://alion.io/job/salla-senior-ml-backend-engineer-search-recommendations-2","title":"Senior ML Backend Engineer - Search & Recommendations","company":{"id":48957,"name":"Salla","domain":"salla.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/salla","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":null,"truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"inferred_company_offices","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["SA"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":105000,"max_usd":241000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_seniority_cell","sample_n":2365},"experience_years_min":2,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"A/B Testing","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Feature Store","optional":false},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Typesense","optional":false},{"name":"Vespa","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-16T12:49:57Z","employer_posted_date":null,"last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T12:49:57Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":null,"days_open":26,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":26},"description":"You'll own the online systems that take a catalogue change to a ranked result in front of a shopper: search, retrieval and recommendation serving, the streaming data that keeps them fresh, and the experiments that ship them. \nSalla is the leading e-commerce platform in MENA, serving about 68,000+ merchants. Our AI team is building a self-owned discovery stack across our marketplace and merchant stores: hybrid lexical and vector search, Arabic-first query understanding, and learned ranking shared between search and recommendations. Data scientists own the relevance and ranking models. You own the platform that makes them fast, fresh, reliable and shippable.\nThe work is roughly half online serving, a third streaming data, and the rest integration into product surfaces. You sit on the ML Platform team spending time between search and serving for our recommendation systems and work day to day with search data scientists and the ranking lead\nWhat you'll doOnline serving\nBuild and run query and recommendation serving: retrieval, score fusion, filtering, caching.\n\nHold tight latency budgets, including double-digit-millisecond p95 for search-as-you-type.\n\nDesign graceful degradation, so serving holds up when a model or vector path is slow or down.\n\nBuild experiment plumbing: shadow traffic, A/B assignment, guardrail metrics, rollback.\n\nStreaming data\nBuild change-data-capture from source systems into search indexes and feature stores, with measured freshness.\n\nKeep embeddings fresh for new and updated items.\n\nRun zero-downtime reindexing of multi-million-document collections.\n\nBuild feature logging that turns production traffic into training data for ranking models.\n\nIntegration\nShip changes into product teams' backends and clients: new endpoints, cutovers, experiment flags.\n\nWork with product engineering teams on reviews, release windows and production ownership.\n\nOperability, throughoutMonitoring, alerting, runbooks, and your share of on-call for what you ship.\nRequirements\n5+ years building backend or platform systems in production.\n\n2+ years operating a production search engine (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Typesense, Vespa or similar): index lifecycle, analyzers, reindexing at scale, debugging relevance issues with data scientists.\n\nLow-latency services under real traffic, and the ability to explain where the p95 goes.\n\nStreaming ingestion: Kafka, Debezium or similar change-data-capture, plus idempotent backfills.\n\nStrong Python. Comfortable shipping in TypeScript.\n\nShipped changes through A/B tests and staged rollouts.\n\nDaily use of agentic coding tools such as Claude Code. We expect one engineer plus agents to cover what used to take a team.\n\nOriginally posted on Himalayas","description_format":"text","description_chars":2724,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":2,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Saudi Arabia","iso":"SA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-27T11:29:30Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":52,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":0.85,"p_active":0.811,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":25,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["seen:25","velocity","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-11-11T05:49:22Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/salla-senior-ml-backend-engineer-search-recommendations-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/salla-senior-ml-backend-engineer-search-recommendations-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-11T21:48:16Z","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":43001,"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":48957},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=48957"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fsalla-senior-ml-backend-engineer-search-recommendations-2"},{"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%2Fsalla-senior-ml-backend-engineer-search-recommendations-2"},{"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%2Fsalla-senior-ml-backend-engineer-search-recommendations-2"},{"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/salla-senior-ml-backend-engineer-search-recommendations-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsalla-senior-ml-backend-engineer-search-recommendations-2"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3330352}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"salla.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3330352},"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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