Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Software Engineer role sits at the heart of a core SaaS capability: search delivered as an API at global scale. Algolia’s domain—serving billions of queries and supporting customers across many countries—puts the work squarely in the “platform SaaS” layer where reliability, latency, and data orchestration are product features. The focus on NeuralSearch and a cloud-based indexing/query architecture reflects how modern SaaS products increasingly blend traditional information retrieval with vector-based approaches.
From a SaaS career perspective, the role builds durable experience in operating distributed systems that directly underpin customer-facing outcomes. Ownership that spans design through production operations (including on-call) develops the operational judgment that many SaaS companies expect from senior engineers. Working on indexing pipelines, storage, and query orchestration also provides transferable foundations for other high-scale SaaS domains such as observability, analytics, and personalization.
This position tends to suit engineers who prefer deep systems work over surface-level feature delivery, and who like collaborating across teams to resolve high-impact issues. It aligns well with professionals comfortable balancing product evolution with production stewardship, especially those interested in search infrastructure and the practical realities of running critical services in cloud environments.
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
