Backend Engineer, Search (2027 Graduate)

About The Team

Shopee will be prioritizing applicants who have a current right to work in Singapore, and do not require Shopee sponsorship of a visa. Kindly note that you can only be considered in one recruitment process at a time within Sea Group and will be considered for jobs in the order that you have applied. The Shopee Search Team is at the heart of the user journey. We build and maintain the massive-scale search engine that helps millions of users find exactly what they need among billions of products every single day. Our mission is to provide an \"instant-access\" experience through high-performance, highly available, and scalable backend solutions. As a campus hire, you won't just be writing code; you will be building the \"entry point\" of Shopee. You will gain hands‑on experience in distributed indexing, query processing, and seeing how cutting-edge Information Retrieval (IR) technologies work in massive real-world e-commerce scenarios. If you are passionate about solving complex architectural puzzles and want to see your work impact every search query on the platform, we want you on our team.

Job Description

• Architect the Core: Participate in the design and development of Shopee's core search backend systems, ensuring they can iterate quickly to meet evolving business needs.
• Optimize for Speed & Scale: Enhance the performance of our online search engines, including query understanding, recall, and ranking modules, as well as high-throughput data indexing pipelines.
• Build Global Solutions: Contribute to developing reusable system components and microservices that power Shopee's centralized search platform across multiple markets.
• Innovate & Apply: Stay ahead of industry trends in search engine technology and distributed systems, Work on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications and provide highly relevant, context-aware search results. Design and develop the backend infrastructure for Agentic Search, enabling complex reasoning and multi-step query processing at scale.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, AI, or a related field
• Technical Foundation: Rock-solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Coding Proficiency: Strong skills in Go, C++, or Python. (Experience with AI frameworks like PyTorch or LangChain is a plus but not required - we will teach you!).
• AI Curiosity: A deep interest in how LLMs, Vector Search, and AI Agents are reshaping the software landscape.
• System Mindset: You enjoy solving \"The Scale Problem\" - how to make complex AI reasoning happen in milliseconds for millions of concurrent users.
• Soft Skills: Excellent problem-solving skills, a collaborative spirit, and a 'can-do' attitude toward unexplored technical frontiers.