Strategic Search & AI Architect
AmsterdamRegularPosted Aug 7, 2026
About Marktplaats
Marktplaats is one of the Netherlands' leading online marketplaces, helping make commerce more sustainable by giving products an extended life. With over 2.1 million buyers and sellers visiting our platform every day, around 350,000 new listings added daily and users spending an average of 22 minutes per visit, we're building a platform that people use and trust. Every connection we enable helps people save money, earn money and reduce waste. As part of Adevinta, one of Europe's leading online classifieds groups, we're building products that make buying and selling second-hand products simpler, safer and better for everyone.
This role sits within our Product & Technology function in our Amsterdam office, home to over 300 talented professionals, where cross-functional teams design, develop and scale the products that millions of users rely on every day across our Benelux marketplaces, Marktplaats and 2dehands/2ememain.
You'll join a small architecture team, reporting to the Head of Architecture, embedded with the search and AI product teams and working closely with the data organisation. The foundations are strong: ADRs and an experimentation culture are already in place. The next chapter is a generational shift from query-matching to searcher-understanding, and on a marketplace, that means words and images in equal measure: visual search, image understanding of listings, and camera-based discovery. This shift needs an architectural owner.
What You Will Do
We are looking for the architect who charts the path from where search is to where it is going, knows which steps to take in what order, and drives that change rather than maintaining today's stack.
Who You Are
This is a senior applied architecture profile, not a research or data science role. We are hiring someone who can make search and AI experiences work in production at scale, and who sees three years further than the current backlog.
Bonus Points
Our Tech Stack
This role is based out of our Amsterdam office. While we offer flexibility, we value in-person collaboration and encourage our teams to spend regular time in the office.
Want to learn more about life at Marktplaats? Visit our Careers page to explore our culture, benefits and what it's like to work with us.
Our DNA
Our culture is built on these five principles, shaping how we work together, build products and create value for our customers.
🛠️ Ownership: We take ownership, step in where needed and make things happen.
🤝 Engagement: We show up for each other, build meaningful connections, celebrate success and enjoy the ride together.
❤️ Customer Focus: We put our customers at the heart of our decisions, back our ideas with data and deliver value that makes a difference.
⚡Execution: We move with purpose, challenge ideas respectfully, act with confidence and deliver at pace.
💡 Curiosity: We ask questions, challenge the status quo, embrace learning and turn insights into better decisions.
Equal Opportunity Statement
Marktplaats is an equal opportunity employer, and we value diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.
If you feel you don’t meet all of the listed requirements but are still excited about this role, we encourage you to apply anyway! Research shows that candidates from underrepresented groups sometimes self-select out, we’re interested in your potential as much as your experience.
Marktplaats is one of the Netherlands' leading online marketplaces, helping make commerce more sustainable by giving products an extended life. With over 2.1 million buyers and sellers visiting our platform every day, around 350,000 new listings added daily and users spending an average of 22 minutes per visit, we're building a platform that people use and trust. Every connection we enable helps people save money, earn money and reduce waste. As part of Adevinta, one of Europe's leading online classifieds groups, we're building products that make buying and selling second-hand products simpler, safer and better for everyone.
This role sits within our Product & Technology function in our Amsterdam office, home to over 300 talented professionals, where cross-functional teams design, develop and scale the products that millions of users rely on every day across our Benelux marketplaces, Marktplaats and 2dehands/2ememain.
You'll join a small architecture team, reporting to the Head of Architecture, embedded with the search and AI product teams and working closely with the data organisation. The foundations are strong: ADRs and an experimentation culture are already in place. The next chapter is a generational shift from query-matching to searcher-understanding, and on a marketplace, that means words and images in equal measure: visual search, image understanding of listings, and camera-based discovery. This shift needs an architectural owner.
What You Will Do
We are looking for the architect who charts the path from where search is to where it is going, knows which steps to take in what order, and drives that change rather than maintaining today's stack.
- Own the search, matching, and relevance architecture: the target state, the key design decisions, and the evolution path from today's stack to one that carries semantic and AI-driven experiences at consumer scale.
- Define the multi-year vision for the future of search, spanning LLM-based intent modelling, conversational and agentic retrieval, persistent user memory, behavioural signal fusion in ranking, and computer vision in the experience. Determine which research threads matter for a marketplace, and sequence the ones that do.
- Establish patterns and guardrails for GenAI in the product experience, covering retrieval, ranking, and conversational interfaces: what good looks like, what it costs, and when not to use it. Build on the existing ADR base.
- Represent the consumer side of the ML and AI platform in partnership with the data organisation, articulating what product experiences need from the platform.
- Translate search and AI requirements into clear, actionable expectations around data quality, lineage, and governance. Advise and support the data organisation where asked, without owning their platform.
- Bring clarity to a deliberately varied AI landscape: models served from Databricks, LLMs from several providers. Deciding what we standardise on, and what stays plural, is part of the job.
Who You Are
This is a senior applied architecture profile, not a research or data science role. We are hiring someone who can make search and AI experiences work in production at scale, and who sees three years further than the current backlog.
- At least 10 years of experience in software engineering or applied ML, including 5+ years designing search, relevance or ML systems at consumer scale.
- Deep expertise in search and relevance architecture at consumer scale, spanning retrieval, ranking, embeddings, and evaluation.
- Able to track the research frontier and translate it into product reality: conversational query rewriting, agentic multi-step search, persistent user memory, LLM-based intent modelling, and unbiased learning-to-rank. Knows which of these ship and which stay papers.
- Practical GenAI experience beyond the demo stage, with a clear grasp of the patterns, costs, and failure modes that only emerge in production.
- Experienced with computer vision, including visual search, image similarity, and image understanding. A strong plus for this role: a marketplace is a visual product.
- Proven ability to shape ML systems in close collaboration with data teams without needing to own their platform, maintaining a healthy working relationship across an organisational boundary.
- Designs with evaluation built in: offline metrics, online experiments, LLM-based simulation where live traffic is too slow, and the discipline to kill features that do not perform.
- Pragmatic, delivery-credible, and effective through influence, given that most of the teams you will shape do not report to you.
Bonus Points
- Experience with marketplace or e-commerce search, where inventory is unique, short-lived and cold-start is constant
- Vector search and embedding infrastructure at scale
- Multimodal retrieval that combines text and images
- Unbiased learning-to-rank and click-model debiasing
- Experimentation platforms and offline evaluation harnesses
- Contributions to open-source search or IR tooling, or publications and talks in the field
- Dutch is not required; we work in English
Our Tech Stack
- Languages: Scala, Go and Java on the back end; Kotlin, Swift and TypeScript on the client side
- Databases: MySQL on Aurora RDS and Cassandra, among others
- Search and AI: ElasticSearch; models served from Databricks (Mosaic AI); LLMs from Gemini, OpenAI and AWS, via Bedrock, OpenAI and Databricks
- Data platform: Databricks
- Cloud: AWS
- Other tools: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka, RabbitMQ, GitHub, DataDog
This role is based out of our Amsterdam office. While we offer flexibility, we value in-person collaboration and encourage our teams to spend regular time in the office.
Want to learn more about life at Marktplaats? Visit our Careers page to explore our culture, benefits and what it's like to work with us.
Our DNA
Our culture is built on these five principles, shaping how we work together, build products and create value for our customers.
🛠️ Ownership: We take ownership, step in where needed and make things happen.
🤝 Engagement: We show up for each other, build meaningful connections, celebrate success and enjoy the ride together.
❤️ Customer Focus: We put our customers at the heart of our decisions, back our ideas with data and deliver value that makes a difference.
⚡Execution: We move with purpose, challenge ideas respectfully, act with confidence and deliver at pace.
💡 Curiosity: We ask questions, challenge the status quo, embrace learning and turn insights into better decisions.
Equal Opportunity Statement
Marktplaats is an equal opportunity employer, and we value diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.
If you feel you don’t meet all of the listed requirements but are still excited about this role, we encourage you to apply anyway! Research shows that candidates from underrepresented groups sometimes self-select out, we’re interested in your potential as much as your experience.