Search Software Engineer (Back-end)

About the role

SupportFinity, a leading online retailer in South Africa, is seeking a talented Search Software Engineer (Back‑end) to maintain and evolve its search stack. The role involves working on the transition from Elasticsearch to Vertex AI Search and supporting a 24/7 e‑commerce platform.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build solutions that improve customer experience and assist business users.
• Develop high‑quality production code for complex, high‑scale features.
• Implement and enhance functional and non‑functional testing practices.
• Champion best‑practice engineering standards and iterate on them.
• Participate in architecture proposals and ensure alignment across the organisation.
• Respond to production bugs, alerts, and incident response on a rotational basis.
• Share knowledge through blog posts, tech talks, and workshops.
• Implement and maintain REST and RPC APIs using Python.

Required profile

• Solutions‑oriented with a can‑do attitude and high energy.
• Strong analytical and critical‑thinking skills, using data to inform decisions.
• Ability to break down ambiguous problems into structured solutions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for presenting ideas.

Required skills

• Python (strongly typed open‑source language).
• Experience with search technologies such as Elasticsearch, Vertex AI Search, Solr or Algolia.
• Proficiency in Java or Go (Golang) is a plus.
• RESTful API development and web services.
• SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL).
• Linux development environment.
• Containerisation (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Cloud platforms: AWS, GCP, Azure.