Salla
More roles at SallaSenior ML Backend Engineer - Search & Recommendations
Remote role where the employee must remain based in a particular country.
Saudi Arabia only
From the listing details: Source listing states candidate location: "Makkah, Saudi Arabia, Makkah, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia, Makkah, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia, Remote"
Employer listed it 13 days ago 路 Added 12 days ago
First listed 13 days ago and still open.
Salary
Not stated
Location
Saudi Arabia only
Timezone
Not stated
Contract
Full-time
Experience
Senior
Category
Software
The employer did not publish a salary, and we have too few comparable roles to estimate one.
What the advert says
Quoted word for word from the employer's advert. Where it says nothing, we say so.
- Working hours
- Not mentioned in the advert
- Where you can work from
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.
- Contract
- Not mentioned in the advert
- Experience asked for
- Not mentioned in the advert
- Pay
- Not mentioned in the advert
Remote flexibility
Work from home
This is a remote role, but the employee must be based in Saudi Arabia. It is work from home rather than work from anywhere.
What the employer says
- Source listing states candidate location: "Makkah, Saudi Arabia, Makkah, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia, Makkah, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia, Remote"
What Nomaders makes of it
- Residency required in Saudi Arabia
- Payroll and tax are likely handled in that country only
The quotes above are the employer's own words; the reading is ours. Always check the original listing and employment terms before working from another country.
Before you apply
Questions worth asking: Nomaders interpretation
- No pay is stated. Ask for the salary range before investing time in interviews.
- The advert does not say whether this is employment or a contractor arrangement. Ask, as it affects tax and benefits.
Produced automatically from this advert's text; not reviewed by a person. The employer's own page is the final word.
About the role
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.
Salla 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.
The 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
What you'll do
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, throughout
Monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and your share of on-call for what you ship.
Requirements
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.
Requirements
- 路5+ years building backend or platform systems in production.
- 路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.
- 路Low-latency services under real traffic, and the ability to explain where the p95 goes.
- 路Streaming ingestion: Kafka, Debezium or similar change-data-capture, plus idempotent backfills.
- 路Strong Python. Comfortable shipping in TypeScript.
Benefits
No benefits package published with this listing. Ask about it at first interview.
How to apply
- 1Check the flexibility label above, work from home, matches where you plan to live and work.
- 2Tailor your CV to the role at Salla, mentioning your remote working experience.
- 3Apply directly on the employer's careers page using the button below. Nomaders never handles your application.
Found 13d ago. Last checked today. Always confirm the details on the original posting, salary and location can change after publication.
Listing sourced from Company boards.
Pay not stated 路 You'll be taken to the employer's careers page.