Backend Engineer - Search and Retrieval

Company Description

Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new.
Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it.
Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com
We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users.
We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.
AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human.
If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to [email protected].

Job Description

Depop is looking for an experienced Backend Software Engineer to join us permanently in the Search and Retrieval team. 

Within this role, you’ll be working in the cross-functional team in partnership with mobile, web and machine learning/data science teams to drive the team to success. You will be responsible for maintaining, scaling and improving the search system. As well as improving the underlying infrastructure that serves search and recommendations at Depop. 

Responsibilities:

As a Backend Engineer within this team, you can expect to:

• Work closely with Product Managers, Data Scientists, Front-End and other Backend Engineers to understand problems and to design solutions.

• Produce high-quality code that is well-structured and simple to understand that will be used by 1M+ active daily users

• Embrace agile methodologies

• Engage in a culture of continuous improvement by attending events such as blameless post-mortems, architecture reviews etc. 

• Collaborate on a daily basis with fellow engineers in the cross functional environment to solve problems and write code

• You’ll own , code, workflows and data, through their entire lifecycle

• Documenting any feature development

Qualifications:

• Be capable of writing high quality code in Scala, Java or Python  

• Experience or interest in working with retrieval systems such as Opensearch/Elasticsearch or similar

• Eagerness to work with ML colleagues on ML driven retrieval systems

• Experience with distributed datastores (e.g. DynamoDB, Redshift, AWS Athena)

• Experience with Message queues: (e.g. RabbitMQ / Apache Kafka)

• Experience building scalable applications serving 10,000s of requests per second

• Experience working with RDBMS, ideally Postgres

• DevOps culture (CI/CD pipeline)

• Ability to proactively find and solve complex problems independently, but also know when to seek guidance or help from your peers.

Must haves:

• Experience with Scala or Java or Python

• Proficient in testing solutions at different levels - unit, integration, etc

• Experience with relational or non-relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, AWS Athena

Nice to haves:

• Experience with search systems such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

• Experience with Vector based retrieval systems

• Experience working with ML scientists and ML pipelines 

• Experience in eCommerce

• Experience with event-driven architectures, such as Kafka

• Experience in using production AWS infrastructure

• A genuine curiosity about AI and a willingness to explore how it can enhance your day-to-day work 

Additional Information

Health + Mental Wellbeing

• PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting

Work/Life Balance:

• 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
• Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options *role-dependent
• All offices are dog-friendly
  

Family Life:

• For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
• For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees 
• IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave

Learn + Grow:

• Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews
• Learning budget
• Upskilling our employees with company-wide training workshops, materials and resources

Your Future:

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
• Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva

Depop Extras:

• In-office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery.
• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!