Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This role sits at the infrastructure layer of a SaaS product where search is the core capability, not a supporting feature. Working on a cloud architecture that powers hybrid keyword and vector retrieval reflects where many SaaS platforms are heading as AI search becomes a default expectation. The focus on indexing orchestration and query serving also signals production-grade concerns typical of mature, multi-tenant services operating at global scale.
From a SaaS career perspective, the work builds durable experience in designing and operating distributed systems that directly impact customer-facing reliability. Ownership that spans build, run, and incident response maps closely to how high-availability SaaS is delivered in practice, where operational feedback loops shape architecture. Exposure to large datasets, high traffic, and quality discipline translates well across infrastructure-heavy SaaS domains such as observability, data platforms, and developer tools.
The position is best suited to an engineer who prefers systems-level problem solving and is comfortable being accountable for runtime behavior, including on-call. It will fit someone who enjoys collaborating across teams to resolve high-impact issues and who values deep technical stewardship over narrow feature delivery. A candidate looking to consolidate senior-level judgment in distributed architecture and operations will find the scope aligned with that trajectory.
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
