Java Search Infrastructure Engineer

Join Shopify's dynamic engineering team, where code is core and innovation drives commerce forward. As a Java Search Infrastructure Engineer, you'll build distributed systems that power search query serving across billions of products. Collaborate with platform engineers and SREs to create scalable, resilient search infrastructure that helps merchants succeed at the infinite game of entrepreneurship.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build high-throughput scatter-gather systems that coordinate queries across hundreds of shards and aggregate results efficiently.

• Own search APIs end-to-end—interface design, load balancing, circuit breaking, and graceful degradation.

• Optimize networking and JVM performance—connection pooling, request batching, GC tuning, and profiling for high-load scenarios.

• Design comprehensive observability through structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing.

• Build A/B testing frameworks enabling data-driven experimentation at scale.

• Solve distributed systems challenges—consistency, availability, latency tail tolerance, and failure handling.

Qualifications:

• Proven expertise in Java for building production distributed systems at scale.

• Experience with search infrastructure, particularly scatter-gather patterns and distributed query execution.

• Networking expertise—HTTP/2, TCP tuning, connection management, protocol design.

• Experience with service frameworks—Thrift, gRPC, or similar RPC frameworks.

• Observability expertise—building logging pipelines, metrics infrastructure, distributed tracing.

• Load balancing and A/B testing experience—consistent hashing, adaptive routing, experiment design.

• Strong collaboration skills, working with cross-disciplinary teams including platform engineers and data scientists.

At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly—not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you’re ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. You will be expected to complete a pair programming interview, using your own IDE.

This role may require on-call work.

Ready to craft the world’s best product search and drive AI-powered commerce forward? Join us and make commerce better for everyone.