Search Engineer

About Us

Slikk is a Series A fashion quick-commerce startup based in Bangalore, delivering curated fashion and lifestyle products in under 60 minutes. Backed by Nexus Venture Partners and Lightspeed. Lean team, high ownership, low process overhead, strong bias for execution.

Role Overview

Own end-to-end search, ranking, and discovery. When a user searches for a polo t-shirt, we surface the 10–15 most relevant styles — personalised, inventory-aware, and delivered in 60 minutes. You’ll build the infrastructure that makes this possible.

Key Responsibilities

• Own search infrastructure end-to-end — indexing, query understanding, retrieval, ML-powered ranking, and result serving.
• Build real-time indexing pipelines syncing with rapidly changing inventory, pricing, and catalogue data across dark stores.
• Design ranking systems blending relevance, personalisation, inventory availability, and business rules.
• Build the discovery layer beyond search — personalised feeds, category ranking, similar products, and “complete the look.”
• Design A/B testing for search quality (MRR, NDCG, CTR, conversion) and optimise for P95 < 200ms latency.

Required Qualifications

• 5–7 years building production search/IR systems, ideally in e-commerce.
• Deep Elasticsearch/OpenSearch expertise — index design, custom analysers, query DSL, performance tuning.
• Experience with ML ranking — LTR (XGBoost/LightGBM), embedding retrieval (FAISS/HNSW), feature engineering.
• Strong Python; NLP fundamentals for query understanding (tokenisation, entity extraction, intent classification).
• Experience with real-time indexing (Kafka/CDC) and search quality experimentation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate) or hybrid keyword + semantic search.
• Recommendation systems (collaborative filtering, two-tower models) or visual search experience.

What We Offer

• High-ownership engineering culture with direct product impact.
• Competitive salary and meaningful equity.
• Category-defining problems in quick commerce and fashion tech.