Search Software Engineer

About the role

Takealot.com, South Africa’s leading online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Software Engineer (backend, preferably with search experience) to join our team. We are a young, dynamic, hyper-growth company looking for smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us!

Think you’ve been challenged before? Think again!

- Scale: Over 4 million happy shoppers shop online on takealot.com. Show them what you can do.

- Learn: We work with the best of the best. Code alongside industry leaders and up-skill in record time.

- Grow: Expand your career in the fast-growing Takealot Group: takealot.com, TFS and Mr D. We like to promote from within: Here’s your chance.

Who’s who in the tech space

This position reports to the respective team's manager.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

As a Software Engineer, you will be someone whose expertise directly translates into developing robust software in the e-commerce domain. You will have the opportunity to implement best practices to improve existing software and participate in the development of new features. While we don't promote after-hours work as part of the regular workday, we run a 24/7 business with the need to keep systems up and running. Software Engineers are expected to provide after-hours support on a rotational basis to resolve critical system issues if needed.

The role is focused on maintaining our search stack. We are currently in the process of transitioning from Elasticsearch to Vertex AI Search, so experience with any of those would be a bonus, but not a necessity. Experience with any kind of search technology (Solr, Algolia) is relevant, but even if you don’t have search experience, the most important factor is that you enjoy building scalable back-end systems, and have a strong interest in understanding how search systems are built to scale to that serve millions of customers. Takealot runs mostly on Python, but experience in any of the mainstream backend languages (Python, Java or Go) is a plus.

- Design and build solutions to assist our business users and improve customer experience

- Architect and design solutions with your team

- Develop code, making major improvements to non-functional areas

- Develop high-quality production code for work of high complexity and scale

- Utilize and improve functional and non-functional testing practices

- Champion, challenge, and iterate on best practices within engineering

- Design solutions for complex problems with difficult decision trade-offs, typically system or domain-wide

- Participate in and collaborate on architecture proposals across engineering

- Support alignment of architecture across the organisation

- Respond to and resolve bugs in production for systems in your division

- Respond to alerts and support incident response within your division