Backend Engineer – Ranking Team

About Us

Constructor is the next-generation platform for search and discovery in ecommerce, built to explicitly optimize for metrics like revenue, conversion rate, and profit. Our search engine is entirely invented in-house utilizing transformers and generative LLMs, and we use its core and personalization capabilities to power everything from search itself to recommendations to shopping agents. Engineering is by far our largest department, and we’ve built our proprietary engine to be the best on the market, having never lost an A/B test to a competitive technology. We’re passionate about maintaining this and work on the bleeding edge of AI to do so.

Out of necessity, our engine is built for extreme scale and powers over 1 billion queries every day across 150 languages and roughly 100 countries. It is used by some of the biggest ecommerce companies in the world like Sephora, Under Armour, and Petco.

We’re a passionate team who love solving problems and want to make our customers’ and coworkers’ lives better. We value empathy, openness, curiosity, continuous improvement, and are excited by metrics that matter. We believe that empowering everyone in a company to do what they do best can lead to great things.

Constructor is a U.S. based company that has been in the market since 2019. It was founded by Eli Finkelshteyn and Dan McCormick who still lead the company today.

About the Team

The Ranking team, within the Machine Learning chapter, plays a central role in implementing algorithms that optimize for business KPIs like revenue & conversions. We focus on metrics over features, arming our ranking algorithms with powerful capabilities that bring value to customers in the way they care the most about. 

As a member of the Ranking team, you will be surrounded by and encouraged to use world-class analytical, engineering and machine-learning techniques on big data to shape the evolution and scale of our ranking algorithms. The team owns all stages of products ranking for Search, Browse, and Autocomplete experiences, including base ranking, second-stage ranking, and ranking explanation.

One of the main services the Ranking team owns is the ML Ranking Service which is a high-load distributed REST service deployed in the cloud and developed in Python programming language. The service extensively uses in-memory and NoSQL DBs (for signals and model metadata storage). We support service deployment and stability. We have monitoring set up with Prometheus, PagerDuty, Sentry, and custom internal APIs with FastAPI).

Challenges you will tackle

A primary focus of this job is to design, deliver & maintain highload real-time web services in close collaboration with other great engineers from the Ranking team. The job can consist of, but is not limited to:

• Build, deploy, and support robust high-load machine learning-based real-time systems for search and browse experiences. 
• Collaborate with technical and non-technical business partners to develop and update ranking functionalities
• Optimize current ranking service performance to process requests faster
• Optimize signals delivery and retrieval (aka Feature Store) for machine learning model inference
• Communicate with stakeholders within and outside the team

Requirements

Hard skills:

• Experience in designing, developing & maintaining high-load distributed real-time services (in cloud)
• Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like CloudFormation or Terraform for managing cloud resources.
• Experience with MLOps is a huge plus (delivering, loading, and serving ML models and related infrastructure)
• Hands-on experience with setting up and improving CI/CD pipelines
• Proficiency with Python and, as a plus, compiled languages like C, Rust, or Go.  
• Experience in server-side coding for web services, and a good understanding of API design principles.
• Skilled in setting up and managing observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and integrating alert systems like PagerDuty.
• Familiarity with Service-Oriented Architecture, knowledge of communication protocols like Protobuf & familiarity with networking principles
• Experience with NoSQL and relational databases, distributed systems, and caching solutions.
• Experience with any of the major public cloud formation: AWS (ideally), Azure, GCP

Soft skills:

• Experience collaborating in cross-functional teams.
• Excellent English communication skills.
• Enjoy helping others around you grow as developers and be successful
• Pick up new ideas and technologies quickly, love learning and talking to others about them
• Love to experiment and use data and customer feedback to drive decision-making

Benefits

• ️ Unlimited vacation time – we strongly encourage all of our employees take at least 3 weeks per year
• Fully remote team – choose where you live 
• ️ Work from home stipend! We want you to have the resources you need to set up your home office 
• Apple laptops provided for new employees
• ‍ Training and development budget for every employee, refreshed each year
• Maternity & Paternity leave for qualified employees
• Work with smart people who will help you grow and make a meaningful impact
• This position has a base salary range between $80k and $120k USD. The offer varies on many factors including job related knowledge, skills, experience, and interview results.
• Regular team offsites to connect and collaborate

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Constructor

At 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.

Studies 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.