Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Search infrastructure roles sit at the core of SaaS product performance, and this one is anchored in a high-volume, API-first environment where search quality is part of the customer experience. The focus on a cloud-based architecture for NeuralSearch signals work that blends classical information retrieval with newer vector-based approaches, a combination increasingly common across modern SaaS platforms. Building and querying indices from customer data also places the work close to real production constraints rather than isolated R and D.
For a SaaS engineering career, this position offers durable exposure to the problems that recur across subscription software at scale: distributed orchestration, reliability tradeoffs, operational ownership, and the engineering discipline needed when systems answer billions of requests. Experience here tends to transfer well to other platform and infrastructure teams, particularly where multi-tenant data, latency, and incident response shape technical decisions.
This role is best suited to engineers who like owning systems end to end, from design through on-call operations, and who are comfortable collaborating across teams to resolve high-impact issues. It will appeal to professionals who want to deepen distributed systems expertise while staying connected to product outcomes that customers feel directly.
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
