Search Engineer – SDE-2

Job Title: Search Engineer – SDE-2 Location: Bengaluru, India Department: Engineering – Discovery & Search Experience: 4–6 years Employment Type: Full-time About Licious At Licious, we are building India’s most trusted brand for fresh meat and seafood, powered by technology, innovation, and obsession for quality. As part of our Discovery & Search team, you’ll work on delivering relevant, personalized, and lightning-fast search experiences for millions of customers daily. Role Overview We’re looking for a Search Engineer (SDE-2) who is passionate about building scalable, intelligent, and data-driven search systems. You’ll be responsible for improving product discovery across Licious platforms by optimizing search relevance, performance, and quality using modern backend and search technologies. You’ll collaborate closely with Product, Data, and Platform teams to deliver search experiences that make discovery seamless, personalized, and delightful for users. Responsibilities - Design and implement high-performance search and discovery systems using Java, Spring Boot, and OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch). - Develop and optimize indexing pipelines, ensuring freshness, accuracy, and minimal latency. - Implement relevance tuning, ranking models, and spell correction strategies (e.g., “did-you-mean”, auto-suggestions). - Work with catalog, pricing, and availability services to enhance query responses with contextual metadata. - Analyze search metrics such as CTR, no-result rates, latency, and recall to continuously improve relevance. - Design and maintain APIs powering Search, Product Listing Pages (PLP), Product Detail Pages (PDP), and other discovery modules. - Collaborate with data and ML teams to integrate personalization and cohort-based ranking into the search pipeline. - Write clean, scalable, and testable code with solid understanding of system design and distributed systems. - Participate in code reviews, production readiness reviews, and continuous performance tuning. - Contribute to A/B testing of search features and monitor impact through telemetry and analytics. Required Skills & Qualifications - 4–6 years of experience in backend engineering, with at least 3 years working on search or large-scale data systems. - Strong proficiency in Java, Spring Boot, and RESTful microservice design. - Hands-on experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch – indexing, querying, analyzers, scoring, relevance tuning. - Experience with query understanding, or semantic search (vector search, embeddings). - Should be strong in complex problem solving, Data Structure & Algorithms. - Strong knowledge of data modeling, caching, and API optimization for high QPS systems. - Familiarity with observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Kibana) and performance monitoring. - Understanding of distributed systems, asynchronous processing, and search schema design. Good to Have - Experience with recommendation systems - Exposure to Kafka, Redis, or Cassandra for data pipelines. - Have knowledge on AWS deployments. - Familiarity with A/B testing frameworks and data-driven experimentation. - Understanding of consumer behavior analytics and search ranking models. - Prior experience in e-commerce, discovery, or food-tech systems. - Comfortable writing Unit tests. Why Licious - Work on cutting-edge search and discovery challenges at consumer scale. - Ownership-driven culture with opportunities to influence search roadmap and architecture. - Collaborate with talented engineers across catalog, personalization, and data science teams. - Competitive compensation, benefits, and a growth-oriented environment.