Senior Search Engineer – Elasticsearch/OpenSearch (f/m/d)

kfzteile24 is Germany's leading digital company for car parts and automotive equipment. As a Berlin-based multichannel company, we own successful online shops like kfzteile24.de, autoteile24.de, and carpardoo in multiple European countries. We are Germany's best-known brand in the online aftermarket. With expert advice, a wide range of products and fast, reliable deliveries, we ensure individual mobility for our customers.

As a Senior Search Engineer (f/m/d), you will play a key role in architecting and operating the core services that power our search and product discovery capabilities. Our search has to solve a unique challenge: mapping customer queries and inquiries regarding their vehicles to millions of spare parts within milliseconds. You will join a cross-functional team dedicated to building a high-performance, automotive-aware search solution. Using Java, OpenSearch, and related technologies on our AWS infrastructure, you will design and optimize a system where speed, relevance, ranking, and precision are the top priorities.

What we offer

• Permanent employment contract and 30 days vacation

• Possibility of home office 3 days a week

• Internal and external training opportunities

• Up to 50% employee discount in our branches and workshops

• Various health and sport offers (e.g. Bike-Leasing, VDU glasses)

• Additional benefits such as language courses via Babbel, company pension plan, corporate benefits

Your responsibility

• Search Architecture: Design and implement scalable, low-latency search services in Java, focusing on OpenSearch/Elasticsearch cluster architecture.

• Relevance Tuning: Own the end-to-end search experience by tuning Query DSL, scoring functions, and analyzers to handle complex vehicle-fitment logic.

• Performance Engineering: Ensure high availability and low latency under high traffic conditions through efficient sharding, indexing strategies, and caching.

• Data Modeling: Collaborate on API and data model designs to support highly structured automotive data, ensuring relevant and personalized search results.

• Full Lifecycle Ownership: From architectural discussions and code reviews to deployment and continuous monitoring (Observability).

• Mentorship: Act as the subject matter expert for Search within the engineering community.

Your skills

• Search Specialist: 5+ years in software engineering with a deep focus on Search Technologies (OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Solr, or Lucene).Java Expert: Strong backend foundations in Java and the Spring ecosystem.

• Search Expertise: Solid understanding of search relevance, tokenization, synonym handling, and performance tuning of large-scale distributed systems.

• Cloud Native: Experience with AWS (ideally Amazon OpenSearch Service), Docker, and Kubernetes.

• Mindset: Pragmatic, collaborative, and able to communicate complex technical search concepts clearly (English required, German is a plus).

Bonus Skills

• Domain Knowledge: Experience in E-commerce Search or the automotive domain.

• DevOps & Observability: Skills in Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) and monitoring tools like New Relic or OpenTelemetry.

• AI augmented Search: Hands‑on practice integrating LLM methods into search stacks, covering generative query optimization and RAG‑based retrieval enhancement.

Apply now!

If you would like to be part of our motivated IT-Team, apply now for the position with us as Senior Search Engineer - Elasticsearch/Opensearch (f/m/d), stating your salary expectations and your earliest starting date. If you have any questions, please contact Irina Ring at +49 01520 315 4804.

Please note that we only consider applications via our online portal. Applications by post or e-mail will not be considered and disposed of or deleted.

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