---
title: 'Staff Backend Engineer - Search Features & APIs (SABR) at Constructor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-backend-engineer-search-features-apis-sabr-constructor-remote-swvhg2k68v36'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-16'
---

# Staff Backend Engineer - Search Features & APIs (SABR) at Constructor

- **Company:** Constructor
- **Location:** Remote
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/constructor/15d18cf5-acb4-4094-a029-491a6e2d042b

## Job description

## About us

Launched in 2019, Constructor is an AI-first e-commerce search and discovery platform that helps shoppers find the right products at the right time and enables leading global e-commerce brands to drive meaningful revenue and conversion gains.

## About the team

The SABR team owns the top layer of request processing for product discovery. We own the service that first receives product discovery requests (autocomplete, search, browse & recommendations) & executes the entire business logic that drives product discovery. That service also functions as a gateway to parse incoming user requests, orchestrate calls across the internal services that do the ranking and retrieval, interpret their responses, and assemble the final response the customer sees. We also own the public configuration APIs customers use to control how discovery behaves, and the MCP layer that exposes all of it to AI agents.

Our team owns both platform & product components: Because of the positioning of our services, we take part in every architectural decision of our core product offering. At the same time, our goals are heavily influenced by direct customer feedback, because all product discovery-related features are either implemented in or integrated with our services.

All of our services are public APIs, so interface design and backward compatibility are a constant part of the job. But most of our attention goes to keeping them fast and up: we serve up to 15k RPS, fan out to many internal services on every request, and are expected to stay available and degrade gracefully when any of them fails or slows down.

The work is distributed systems in practice rather than in theory: request orchestration, failure isolation, caching, latency budgets, capacity planning, and the observability to know what is actually happening in production. The team is small enough that engineers own problems end to end, from design through on-call.

## About you

You're a staff-level engineer who wants to own systems, not tickets. You've built high-traffic, low-latency Python services and carried the pager for them. You think in trade-offs: latency versus cost, flexibility versus a public API that customers can't afford to see break, the fix that ships this week versus the architecture that has to last two years. You can lead work that spans several engineers and several quarters, you enjoy mentoring others, and you're fine when a problem shows up half-defined. You don't mind being the one who reads the spec for some unfamiliar protocol, works out how it fits, and designs an integration that holds up at scale. You change your mind when someone has a better argument, you make the people around you better, and you still care about your code long after it merges.

## What you will do

- Own the technical direction of one or more of our services - architecture, performance, and reliability.
- Lead design of new systems and public APIs, and the evolution of existing ones as traffic and feature scope grow.
- Raise the engineering bar through design and code review, and mentor mid and senior engineers into owning bigger scopes.
- Partner with product, other engineering teams, and solutions/support to shape what we build and to represent search constraints and trade-offs honestly.
- Take part in on-call for the systems you own, and lead incident response and follow-through when things break.

## What we are looking for

Technical

- Substantial experience building and operating high-traffic, low-latency backend services in production.
- Extensive Python knowledge (our primary language).
- Experience with observability and performance work in live systems.
- Experience designing and evolving public APIs that external customers depend on.
- Experience designing & implementing scalable service-oriented architectures.

Beyond the code

- Track record of leading projects that span multiple engineers and quarters.
- Influence without authority, and willingness to change your position when someone has a better argument.
- Clear written communication - design docs, RFCs, postmortems.
- Good judgment about trade-offs and scope.
- Comfort with ambiguity and loosely defined problems.
- Ownership that extends past merge, to how the system behaves in production.

## Nice to have

- Experience with AWS
- Background in search, ranking, information retrieval, or e-commerce product discovery.
- Exposure to AI/LLM-facing infrastructure (MCP, agent tooling, or similar).

## Benefits

🏝️ Unlimited vacation time - we strongly encourage all of our employees take at least 3 weeks per year 🌎 Fully remote team - choose where you live 🛋️ Work from home stipend! We want you to have the resources you need to set up your home office 💻 Apple laptops provided for new employees 🧑‍🎓 Training and development budget for every employee, refreshed each year 👪 Maternity & Paternity leave for qualified employees 🧠 Work with smart people who will help you grow and make a meaningful impact 💵 Base salary: $110k–$130k USD, depending on knowledge, skills, experience, and interview results 📈 Stock options - offered in addition to the base salary 🎉 Regular team offsites to connect and collaborate

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Constructor At [Constructor.io](http://Constructor.io) we are committed to cultivating a work environment that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome individuals of all backgrounds and provide equal opportunities to all applicants regardless of their education, diversity of opinion, race, color, religion, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status or affiliation in any other protected group.

Studies have shown that women and people of color may be less likely to apply for jobs unless they meet every one of the qualifications listed. Our primary interest is in finding the best candidate for the job. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all of our listed qualifications.

How we handle your data. By submitting this application, you acknowledge that Constructor will collect and process the personal data you provide for the purpose of evaluating your candidacy for this role. If you are not selected, we will retain your data for a limited period as described in our Recruitment Privacy Notice. After that period your data will be deleted or anonymized.

How we handle your data. By submitting this application, you acknowledge that Constructor will collect and process the personal data you provide for the purpose of evaluating your candidacy for this role. If you are not selected, we will retain your data for a limited period as described in our [Recruitment Privacy Notice](https://constructor.com/recruitment-privacy-notice). After that period your data will be deleted or anonymized.

## About Constructor

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI-powered ecommerce search and product discovery (SaaS)
- **Target customers**: B2B, enterprise ecommerce brands, retailers, distributors, and marketplaces
- **Mission/purpose**: To automate the rich complexity required for a modern search experience behind a simple, elegant SaaS solution, helping shoppers find what they want to buy using natural language and AI.

## Products & Services
- **AI Shopping Agent**: Natural language conversational agent that helps shoppers discover products and answer questions.
- **Search & Browse**: Personalized search and category browsing with reinforcement learning.
- **Recommendations**: Product recommendations for onsite, email, SMS, and mobile notifications.
- **Retail Media**: Sponsored products and ads that don’t sacrifice customer experience.
- **Merchandiser Controls**: Tools for merchants to manage rankings, promotions, and experiments.
- **Insights & Automations**: Dashboards, reports, and automated attribute enrichment using GenAI.
- **Answer Engine Assistants (Beta)**: Integration with ChatGPT and other answer engines for offsite discovery.
- **Merchant Intelligence Agent (Beta)**: Research and fix ranking issues.
- **Product Insights Agent**: Generate personalized product questions to help shoppers buy with confidence.
- **Collections**: Dynamic, curated product pages.
- **In-Store**: Extend online intelligence to physical stores.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private)
- **Key Metric**: $40.0M annual revenue (LinkedIn estimate); $86.1M total funding across 4 rounds
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not named in provided sources, but clients include Sephora, Under Armour, Petco, and many others.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - 336 employees (LinkedIn) / 375+ team members (company site), +48% YoY headcount growth
  - 400+ billion requests powered per year
  - 98.5% average client retention rate over the last three years
  - Named a Leader in Forrester Wave (Commerce Search & Product Discovery, Q3 2025), Gartner Magic Quadrant (Search & Product Discovery, 2025), and IDC MarketScape
  - Top rated on G2 Crowd and Gartner Peer Reviews (4.9 and 4.8 respectively)
  - 94% team member retention rate

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-native from day one**: Built on clickstream data and advanced AI, not bolted onto legacy keyword search.
- **Reinforcement learning across touchpoints**: Every interaction (search, browse, agent) makes the system smarter.
- **API-first, headless, composable, platform-agnostic**: Easy integration with any tech stack.
- **Ecommerce-specific optimization**: Sole focus on commerce metrics (revenue, conversion, profit), consistently delivering $10M+ revenue lifts for customers.
- **Only vendor named a Leader by three independent analyst firms (Forrester, Gartner, IDC)**.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI agents and reasoning**: Expanding AI Shopping Agents, Answer Engine Assistants, and Merchant Intelligence Agents.
- **Offsite discovery**: Enabling discovery via email, SMS, and answer engines like ChatGPT.
- **In-store integration**: Extending online intelligence to physical retail.
- **Continued investment in personalization and automation** to reduce setup time (8 weeks or less).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Remote-first, 100% remote – choose where you live. Collaborative, empathetic, and problem-solving environment. Rated top 5% on RepVue and a Will Reed Top 100 award recipient.
- **Benefits**:
  - Company pays 99% of medical, dental, and vision premiums for US team members.
  - Unlimited PTO and vacation time (minimum 3 mandatory weeks off per year).
  - Paid parental leave.
  - Yearly Remote Work Stipend + one-time $500 New Hire Setup Stipend.
  - Yearly Learning & Development $500 Stipend.
  - Stock options for every team member.
  - Company-issued Apple laptop.
- **Growth**: Fast-growing startup with opportunities to work on challenging AI/ML problems used by millions of shoppers. Mentorship, autonomy, and career development.
- **Diversity & Inclusion**: Committed to DEI with an internal ERG.
- **Team**: 94% retention rate; described as collaborative, brilliant people who enjoy solving hard problems.

## Sources
1. [Constructor Careers Page](https://constructor.com/about/careers)
2. [Constructor Main Website](https://constructor.com/)
3. [Constructor LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/constructor-io)
4. [Constructor About Page](https://constructor.com/about)
5. [CB Insights Company Profile](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/constructorio) (used for funding and revenue data, though not directly cited in text – revenue from LinkedIn)

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