Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Search is a foundational SaaS capability, and Algolia operates at the infrastructure layer where product promises are made real through latency, relevance, and reliability. This role sits inside a cloud-based platform that supports NeuralSearch, blending keyword and vector retrieval, which places it squarely in the current wave of AI-enabled SaaS features. The remit spans indexing pipelines, query serving, and the distributed components that keep customer data searchable at scale.
For a SaaS engineering career, the value here is sustained exposure to production distributed systems where operational constraints shape architecture. Work on high-throughput, customer-facing APIs builds instincts that transfer across modern SaaS platforms: designing for multi-tenant workloads, handling large datasets, and balancing correctness with performance. Ownership of quality and participation in on-call also develops the practical reliability skills that are often the difference between feature delivery and durable platform engineering.
This role tends to suit engineers who like systems thinking and are comfortable tracing issues across multiple services and teams. It fits someone who wants depth in platform and infrastructure work rather than purely application-layer development, and who is motivated by measurable outcomes such as stability, scalability, and query performance in real customer 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 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
