Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Software Engineer role sits at the intersection of core SaaS infrastructure and product capability: building and operating the cloud architecture behind an API-driven search platform that serves high query volumes globally. The focus on NeuralSearch—combining keyword and vector retrieval—signals work on modern search primitives that many SaaS products increasingly depend on, especially where relevance, latency, and scale are part of the customer experience.
From a SaaS career perspective, the differentiator here is end-to-end ownership of distributed systems that must be reliable in production: orchestration of indexing, storage of customer data, and real-time querying. That blend of platform engineering and operational responsibility (including an on-call rotation) develops skills that transfer across SaaS companies running multi-tenant services: designing for failure modes, managing performance under load, and collaborating across teams to resolve high-impact incidents.
This is best suited to engineers who prefer foundational work over feature-layer delivery, and who take satisfaction in making complex systems observable, dependable, and maintainable. It will appeal to professionals comfortable working with a remote-first team structure and who want their impact to be measured in system soundness and service outcomes rather than isolated components.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Algolia was built to help users deliver an intuitive search-as-you-type experience on their websites and mobile apps. We provide a search API used by thousands of customers in more than 100 countries. Billions of search queries are answered every month thanks to the code we push into production every day.
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Metis team. We are responsible for Metis, the cloud-based scalable architecture for NeuralSearch, our AI search engine, which incorporates both keyword and vector search. Metis consists of distributed components which orchestrate the building and storage of indices containing customer data and then querying that data to return search results. The role requires understanding and solving the challenges that come with complex distributed systems.
The team is composed of engineers, most of whom are fully remote, with different skill sets and backgrounds. Your experience, your knowledge and your perspective will add to this diversity and help the team deliver products that make a difference.
YOU WILL:
- Be a key contributor to the design and development of the Metis system
- Be responsible for operations for the Metis system including participation in out-of-hours on-call rota
- Work with a full-remote team, with the option to be either full-remote, hybrid or office based (Paris) yourself
- Be responsible for the quality and soundness of the system
- Share your expertise on distributed systems
- Work with other teams to identify, troubleshoot and resolve high impact issues
YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF YOU HAVE:
- Experience designing and operating distributed systems in production
- Experience working with large datasets and high traffic
- Rigor in high code quality, automated testing, and other engineering best practices
- Excellent spoken and written English skills
- Experience at our current stage and beyond ($50-200M ARR range, high growth, lots of change and building internal infrastructure).
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience in Go
- Experience in Kubernetes
- Sensitivity to Site Reliability Engineering
