Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Search is a foundational capability across modern SaaS, and Algolia sits in the infrastructure layer where reliability and relevance directly shape end customer experiences. This role is notable because it focuses on a cloud architecture that blends keyword and vector search, reflecting how SaaS products are increasingly incorporating AI-driven retrieval while still needing predictable latency and operational stability at scale.
For a software engineer building a SaaS career, the Metis remit offers durable experience in designing and running distributed systems that serve high query volumes and large datasets. Work that spans index building, storage, and query orchestration maps closely to common SaaS platform challenges: multi-tenant data handling, performance tuning, incident response, and the engineering discipline required when production traffic is continuous. The operational ownership, including on-call, also builds practical judgement around resilience and change management.
This position tends to suit senior engineers who prefer platform-level problems over feature UI work, and who enjoy collaborating across teams to resolve high-impact issues. It is a strong match for professionals who want their scope to include both architecture and day-to-day operability in a remote-oriented engineering environment.
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
