Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Building search infrastructure sits at the core of many SaaS products, and Algolia’s business is effectively the search layer for other software companies. This Search Platform role is anchored in NeuralSearch, where keyword and vector retrieval meet real production constraints, and in Metis, a cloud architecture that builds, stores, and queries customer indices at scale. The remit signals a platform focus rather than feature delivery, with distributed components and operational ownership as first class concerns.
For a SaaS engineering career, this kind of work compounds: operating multi tenant, high query systems develops instincts around reliability, latency, capacity planning, and safe deployments that translate across infrastructure heavy SaaS domains. Exposure to indexing pipelines and retrieval workloads also provides a practical foundation for modern AI enabled product capabilities, while still being grounded in measurable system behavior and engineering rigor.
This position fits engineers who prefer deep systems problems, clear accountability for production outcomes, and collaboration across teams to resolve high impact issues. It will suit someone comfortable balancing design with operations, including on call participation, and who values working in a remote leaning environment with strong written communication.
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
