About the role
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.
About Shopify
Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. We propel entrepreneurs and enterprises to scale the heights of their potential. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 8,300 employees and generated over $1 trillion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries.
This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option.
About you
Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone.
Before you apply, consider if you can:
- Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone
- Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth
- Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter)
- Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change
- Bring critical thought and opinion
- Put AI agents and tools to work on the tasks they're built for, and focus on the work only humans can do
- Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward
- Work digital-first for your daily work
We may use AI-enabled tools to screen, select, and assess applications. All AI outputs are reviewed and validated by our recruitment team.
