Senior ML Backend Engineer - Search & Recommendations

Role Overview

Senior ML Backend Engineer - Search & Recommendations at Salla. The role is based in MENA, working with the AI team on the leading e-commerce platform serving 68,000+ merchants.

Company Overview

Salla is the leading e-commerce platform in MENA. The AI team is building a self-owned discovery stack across the marketplace and merchant stores, including hybrid lexical and vector search, Arabic-first query understanding, and learned ranking shared between search and recommendations. You sit on the ML Platform team, spending time between search and serving for recommendation systems, working day to day with search data scientists and the ranking lead.

Role Purpose

You own the online systems that take catalogue changes to ranked results in front of shoppers: search, retrieval and recommendation serving, the streaming data that keeps them fresh, and the experiments that ship them. The work is roughly half online serving, a third streaming data, and the rest integration into product surfaces. You own the platform that makes relevance and ranking models fast, fresh, reliable and shippable.

Key Responsibilities

Online Serving

• Build and run query and recommendation serving: retrieval, score fusion, filtering, caching.
• Hold tight latency budgets, including double-digit-millisecond p95 for search-as-you-type.
• Design graceful degradation so serving holds up when a model or vector path is slow or down.
• Build experiment plumbing: shadow traffic, A/B assignment, guardrail metrics, rollback.

Streaming Data

• Build change-data-capture from source systems into search indexes and feature stores, with measured freshness.
• Keep embeddings fresh for new and updated items.
• Run zero-downtime reindexing of multi-million-document collections.
• Build feature logging that turns production traffic into training data for ranking models.

Integration

• Ship changes into product teams' backends and clients: new endpoints, cutovers, experiment flags.
• Work with product engineering teams on reviews, release windows and production ownership.

Operability

• Establish monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and your share of on-call for what you ship.

Qualifications & Experience

• 5+ years building backend or platform systems in production.
• 2+ 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.
• Low-latency services under real traffic, and the ability to explain where the p95 goes.
• Streaming ingestion: Kafka, Debezium or similar change-data-capture, plus idempotent backfills.
• Shipped changes through A/B tests and staged rollouts.

Skills & Competencies

• Strong Python.
• Comfortable shipping in TypeScript.
• Daily use of agentic coding tools such as Claude Code. We expect one engineer plus agents to cover what used to take a team.