Backend Engineer - Search Platform

The Team

The Search Platform focuses on the systems that power product search and discovery. Responsibilities include providing reliable, low-latency indexing and query capabilities, event-driven data synchronization from OLTP stores, and robust operational tooling for building search-backed features.

The current focus is on building an event-driven pipeline that syncs Aurora MySQL changes to OpenSearch in near real time, replacing batch jobs. The team values correctness, back-pressure, operability, and clear ownership to ensure search performance and reliability.

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to lead the architecture and implementation of the search ingestion and serving layers. This person will own critical pathways from change data capture through document aggregation and bulk indexing, maintain OpenSearch clusters and aliases, and partner with product teams to expose clean, well-versioned APIs for search.

---

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate near real-time data pipelines from Aurora MySQL to OpenSearch using CDC, streams, and queues.
• Implement resilient event processing to extract impacted entity IDs, aggregate denormalized documents, and perform efficient bulk indexing.
• Define index mappings, versioning, aliases, and rollout strategies for updates, reindex, and recreate flows with minimal user impact.
• Establish guardrails for operational readiness: health checks, back-pressure controls, retries, DLQs, and replay strategies.
• Improve query performance and relevance through thoughtful data modeling, caching, and aggregation strategies on the search side.
• Drive observability across the pipeline: metrics, logs, tracing, lag monitoring, and actionable alerts.
• Collaborate with application teams to evolve search APIs and integrate new entities or fields safely.
• Contribute to internal platform tooling and best practices for search development, testing, and incident response.

---

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating distributed systems
• Solid understanding of event-driven architecture, streaming, and at-least-once processing semantics
• Experience designing data models and denormalized search documents for OpenSearch or Elasticsearch at scale
• Hands-on expertise with one or more of: CDC pipelines (e.g., DMS/debezium), stream processing, queue-based consumers, bulk indexing
• Strong operational mindset: instrumentation, on-call readiness, incident playbooks, SLOs, capacity planning
• Proficiency with Go or another typed backend language, and familiarity with containerized deployments on Kubernetes

---

Nice to Have

• Experience managing OpenSearch clusters: shard planning, ILM, snapshot/restore, circuit breakers, and query tuning
• Exposure to multi-tenant systems, permission models, or domain-driven document design
• Experience building internal developer tooling, test harnesses, or data replay utilities for pipelines
• Familiarity with AI-assisted search patterns or vector search, and safe rollout strategies alongside keyword search

---

Example Problems You Might Tackle

• Replace nightly batch syncs with low-latency CDC ingestion while keeping indexing idempotent and replayable.
• Design a dual-alias strategy for safe reindex and recreate operations with zero-downtime cutovers.
• Build a health-gated consumer that pauses SQS polling when OpenSearch is degraded and drains safely when green.
• Create end-to-end tests that mutate a seed entity hourly and assert timely reflection in OpenSearch.

---

Tech Stack

• Languages: Go (primary), TypeScript, Python
• Data & Streaming: Aurora MySQL, binlogs, AWS DMS (CDC), Kinesis, SQS
• Search: OpenSearch, index mappings, aliases, bulk API
• Services & APIs: gRPC, REST, Protocol Buffers, OpenAPI-generated SDKs
• Infra & Orchestration: AWS, EKS, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD
• Observability: Datadog (APM, metrics, logs), CloudWatch
• Caching & Storage: Redis, S3

---

Why Work Here?

• Rapidly growing SaaS company with strong financial momentum
• Opportunities to create new products and build systems from scratch
• Leadership and career development opportunities
• Remote-friendly and flexible work schedules
• English-speaking, global team environment
• Attractive benefits and perks (e.g., resort stays, book purchase program, free lunch, offsites, and more)

---

Working Style

Hybrid Work

Combination of office and remote work with flexibility in recommended in-office days. Remote collaboration is supported by tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and Gather.

Flex Work

Customize your working hours to fit your day and responsibilities. Business and client-facing schedules arranged as needed.

Global Environment

Work with team members from over 20 countries, collaborating across languages and cultures in both English and Japanese.

---

Position Details

• Job Title: Backend Engineer - Search Platform
• Employment Type: Full-time
• Salary: ¥4,000,000 to ¥10,000,000 per year
  Final offer dependent on experience and skills
• Location: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo (5 min walk from JR Ebisu Station / 7 min from Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line)
• Probation Period: 6 months (same conditions as full employment)