Staff Backend Product Engineer, Shopping AI & Search squad

You'll join the Shopping AI & Search squad, part of the Shopping Journey tribe within our Consumer Alliance. Shopping Journey's mission is to help customers build lasting habits with HelloFresh, making it effortless to manage a subscription, find and order what they love, and get help when something goes wrong.

Within that tribe, Shopping AI & Search owns a specific bet: building unified AI Assistant experiences for HelloFresh customers inside the chatbot and across the broader shopping journey, including personalized and conversational search and proactive in-app recommendations. The goal is a shopping experience that feels like it understands the customer, wherever they encounter it.

As a Staff Backend Product Engineer, you'll provide technical leadership across this initiative, shaping architecture, driving technical decisions, and helping the squad (and its neighbors) build AI-powered systems that are fast, reliable, and genuinely useful, not just impressive in a demo.

• Lead the technical architecture for unified AI Assistant experiences spanning conversational search, personalized search, and proactive in-app recommendations — so the experience holds together whether the customer is in the chatbot or elsewhere in the app.
• Own end-to-end technical decisions around integrating LLM-powered capabilities into customer-facing systems, weighing quality, latency, and cost at scale.
• Act as the technical bridge between Shopping AI & Search, neighboring squads across Shopping Journey, and product/platform stakeholders, so architecture stays coherent as the assistant expands to new surfaces.
• Define and drive engineering best practices for building and operating AI-powered systems — observability, graceful degradation, and testing strategies for components that are inherently probabilistic.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, design discussions, and hands-on mentoring that raises the engineering bar across the tribe.
• Use AI coding tools (e.g. Claude, Cursor) as a standard part of how you build, and help shape how the wider team adopts AI-assisted engineering practices.
• Shape the technical roadmap by spotting architectural bottlenecks early and proposing improvements before they become blockers.

What you'll bring: The Ingredients

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with deep expertise in distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architecture (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or AWS SQS/SNS).
• Strong hands-on proficiency in Go, or another modern backend language (Java/Kotlin, Python, or TypeScript/Node.js), with the willingness to work in Go, our squad's primary stack.
• Practical experience integrating LLMs or other AI services into production systems via APIs/SDKs. This isn't an ML engineering role — we're not training foundation models — but you're comfortable designing around how they behave: latency, cost, and non-determinism.
• Genuine, daily hands-on use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) that goes beyond casual experimentation, with a practical sense of how the context you give these tools shapes what you get back.
• Solid understanding of modern cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes) and observability practices, with the ability to set and advocate for standards across the tribe.
• A track record of turning ambiguous product problems — search relevance, recommendation quality, conversational UX — into a clear technical roadmap.
• A collaborative, low-ego approach to problem-solving, strong technical judgment, and a real interest in mentoring other engineers.
• Excellent communication skills and comfort working with senior stakeholders and distributed, international teams.

Prior experience with search or recommendation systems is a plus, not a requirement what matters most is your ability to design and operate reliable, scalable backend systems and reason well about new ones. Above all, we're looking for people who will make HelloFresh better. We know there's more than one path to the skills this role needs — if you don't tick every box but think you'd thrive here, we'd still like to hear from you.