Senior Backend Engineer, Buyer
Job description:
The Buyer Domain at Vinted is dedicated to creating a seamless and highly engaging experience for our members as they search, discover, and purchase items. Our challenge is unique: unlike standard e-commerce, our peer-to-peer catalogue consists of hundreds of millions of entirely unique, single-inventory listings, with millions of new items uploaded daily. Connecting the right buyer with the perfect item in real-time is at the very core of Vinted's success.
The CVP team owns the core platform and services that govern how content is geofenced, balanced, and surfaced across Vinted's growing international network of markets. We build robust systems and tooling that manage cross-border visibility, enabling smooth and gradual market connections (e.g., FR-DE, BE-FR-ES) while optimising key liquidity metrics like Sell-Through Rate (STR%) and Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) by balancing the content in multiple channels.
Our team works closely with Content Visibility Management, Search, and Recommender relevance teams to accelerate product development. Currently, we are driving the automation of content visibility experimentation & analysis. Rather than having different content channels independently re-implement visibility controls, we are building a unified platform to provide autonomy to Decision Scientists. In addition, we are highly contributing in growing new large markets such as the USA and Australia.
- Drive technical execution: Design, implement, and maintain highly scalable, reliable, and secure backend systems to ensure efficient content visibility and search mechanisms.
- Guide technical decisions: Contribute to and challenge the technical direction of our backend services, leading system design reviews and ensuring high-quality, maintainable code.
- Scale features globally: Implement and shape A/B tested features that positively impact our 80+ million users. Code changes are rolled out instantly to production.
- Own your services: Monitor and improve backend service performance and stability. The team owns and monitors service-layer measurements (SLIs, SLOs, etc.) and has an on-call rotation which you will participate in.
- Lead team-level initiatives: Lead and drive technical initiatives within the team, while collaborating on domain-wide integrations with other engineering teams (such as Search and Recommender relevance teams).
- Collaborate cross-functionally: Work closely with engineering and product managers, analysts, and other stakeholders, facilitating clear communication within the team and across domains.
- Contribute to product direction: Provide technical feasibility assessments, identify technical risks, and provide effort estimations to help shape our team's product roadmap.
- Foster engineering excellence: Mentor, guide, and share knowledge with other engineers in the team to support their technical growth and promote collaborative best practices
Requirements:
- You have extensive experience in backend software engineering, with a proven track record of designing and building scalable, distributed, and highly available systems.
- You are highly proficient in backend development. We primarily use Go, Kotlin, Ruby, Python — while prior experience in these specific languages is beneficial, a strong foundation in modern backend engineering and a willingness to learn is what matters most.
- Experience with event streaming platforms like Kafka, Apache Flink, or others for real-time data processing and message queueing.
- A track record working with search engines, information retrieval and ranking optimisations technologies (e.g., Vespa, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch) is a high advantage. If not, we expect you to have a strong willingness and motivation to learn.
- You are enthusiastic about AI technologies, use AI tools daily in your work, and proactively learn and experiment with how to adopt AI to boost engineering outcomes.
- Strong understanding of continuous integration and deployment pipelines, with experience in tools like Jenkins for automating builds and deployments.
- Experience with observability and monitoring tools (we use Grafana, Kibana, and others) to keep services healthy and define SLIs/SLOs.
- Experience working with relational and in-memory databases.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills, with experience working with cross-functional peers (Product, Analytics, SRE).
- Experience in mentoring other engineers, providing constructive feedback, and promoting engineering best practices within your team.
- Excellent written and spoken English.
Company offers:
- The opportunity to benefit from our share options programme
- 25 working days of holiday
- Access to all the tools & tech needed for work
- Home office support: we provide IT workstation equipment and a personal budget of up to 540 for home workplace furniture
- Private health insurance
- Pension plan with flexible contribution options and a matching contribution from Vinted
- Confidential Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for you and your family
- Frequent team-building events
- A personal monthly budget for shopping on Vinted
- A dog-friendly office
- In Vilnius office: Gym & in-house meals at friendly prices
- In Kaunas office: a monthly lunch allowance, and a once-a-week provided in-house lunch and breakfast