Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Software Engineer role sits at a core SaaS problem: delivering reliable, low latency search at scale as a product capability rather than an internal feature. Algolia operates a search API used across many customer applications, and the Metis platform underpins NeuralSearch by orchestrating index building, storage, and query serving across distributed components. That makes the work directly tied to the operational realities of multi-tenant, cloud-delivered infrastructure.
For a long-term SaaS engineering path, the role offers sustained exposure to the mechanics of running production systems that are both customer-facing and data-intensive. The combination of distributed architecture, high traffic patterns, and operational ownership aligns with the skills that translate across infrastructure-heavy SaaS companies: designing for resilience, diagnosing cross-service failures, and building observability and automation into the development lifecycle. Participation in an on-call rotation further reinforces the product reliability mindset common in mature SaaS platforms.
This position fits engineers who prefer systems work with clear production feedback loops and who enjoy collaborating across teams to resolve high-impact issues. It is well suited to someone comfortable balancing design depth with operational responsibility, and to professionals who want their SaaS experience to center on platform foundations rather than application-layer features.
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
