Senior Software Engineer (Ranking)

At Algolia, we’re proud to be a pioneer and market leader in AI Search, empowering 17,000+ businesses to deliver blazing-fast, predictive search and browse experiences at internet scale. Every week, we power over 30 billion search requests — four times more than Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo combined.

In 2021, we raised $150 million in Series D funding, quadrupling our valuation to $2.25 billion. This strong foundation enables us to keep investing in our market-leading platform and serving incredible customers like Under Armour, PetSmart, Stripe, Gymshark, and Walgreens.

The Team

The Relevance Group is dedicated to advancing the core search experience by improving both pre-query relevance (Understanding) and post-query relevance (Ranking). Within the Ranking team, we own key customer-facing capabilities like AI Re-Ranking, helping customers get better results with measurable impact. We’re looking for problem solvers with an entrepreneurial mindset, people who focus on outcomes and use data to drive decisions.

The team is composed of engineers with different skill sets and backgrounds. Your experience, your knowledge, and your perspective will add to this diversity and help us deliver products that make a difference.

The role will consist of:

As a Senior Software Engineer (Ranking), you’ll be a core contributor to how Algolia ranks results at scale. You’ll work at the intersection of backend engineering, data pipelines, and applied AI, shipping features that directly improve the search experience for thousands of customers.

You will:

• Design and build Ranking features end to end, from technical design through production rollout and iteration, with a clear focus on customer impact.
• Build and operate production-grade pipelines that power relevance features (including AI Re-Ranking), with strong attention to correctness, reliability, and cost.
• Own quality and soundness of our data flows, raising the bar on testing, observability, and operational readiness so systems behave predictably at high load.
• Work closely across disciplines, collaborating with frontend engineers, ML specialists, and product partners to turn ideas into robust, customer-facing capabilities.
• Use data to guide decisions, define success metrics, dig into datasets, and run experiments that make relevance improvements measurable and repeatable.
• Mentor and uplift the team, through thoughtful reviews, sharing best practices, and helping build a culture of strong ownership and continuous improvement.

You might be a fit if you have:

Must-haves:

• Experience designing and operating production pipelines (batch, streaming, or hybrid) and being accountable for their reliability.
• Confidence working with large datasets and high-traffic systems, and a pragmatic approach to performance, scaling, and cost.
• Experience building and maintaining API services used by internal teams and/or external customers.
• Strong engineering fundamentals: high code quality, automated testing, and maintainable design in evolving codebases.
• Experience with a major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, or Azure), plus comfort debugging production issues using logs, metrics, and traces.
• Excellent spoken and written English.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience operating AI models in production (monitoring, drift, latency, failure modes, evaluation).
• Strong Go and/or Python proficiency (or the ability to ramp up quickly).
• A track record of data-driven decision making, exploring datasets with SQL, and communicating insights clearly.
• Kubernetes experience, especially running services and pipelines in cloud-native environments.
• Sensitivity to end user experience, you enjoy connecting technical choices to what customers feel.

Team’s current stack

Golang, Python, GCP, Kubernetes, SQL

FLEXIBLE WORKPLACE STRATEGY:

Algolia’s flexible workplace model is designed to empower all Algolians to fulfill our mission to power search and discovery with ease. We place an emphasis on an individual’s impact, contribution, and output, over their physical location. Algolia is a high-trust environment and many of our team members have the autonomy to choose where they want to work and when. 

We have a global presence with offices in Paris, NYC, London, Sydney and Bucharest, however we also offer many of our team members the option to work remotely either as fully remote or hybrid-remote employees. Positions listed as "Remote" are only available for remote work within the specified country. Positions listed within a specific city are only available in that location - depending on the role it may be available with either a hybrid-remote or in-office schedule.

WE’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO CAN LIVE OUR VALUES:

• GRIT - Problem-solving and perseverance capability in an ever-changing and growing environment.
• TRUST - Willingness to trust our co-workers and to take ownership.
• CANDOR - Ability to receive and give constructive feedback.
• CARE - Genuine care about other team members, our clients and the decisions we make in the company.
• HUMILITY - Aptitude for learning from others, putting ego aside.

We’re looking for talented, passionate people to help build the world’s best search and discovery technology. We value autonomy, diversity, and collaboration. We’re committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone is respected and supported—regardless of race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability, or socioeconomic background.

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR CANDIDATES - Recruitment Fraud Notice

We’ve recently seen an increase in recruitment scams targeting job seekers. To help protect yourself, please keep the following in mind:

• Our open positions may appear on third-party job boards, but the best way to apply safely is directly through our careers page.
• All genuine communication from Algolia will come from an @algolia.com email address. If you receive an email from someone claiming to work at Algolia who does not have an @algolia.com email address, please do not respond or share any personal information.
• We’ll never ask for payments, purchases, or financial details during the hiring process.

READY TO APPLY?

If you share our values and our enthusiasm for building the world’s best search & discovery technology, we’d love to review your application!