All remote jobs

Senior Backend Engineer, Search

Review the role, location requirements, compensation details, and application process before deciding whether this opportunity fits your next career move.

Remote from
USA
Salary
USD 200k–250k / yr
Employment
Full Time
Experience
Senior
Published
Apply before
21 Nov 2026
Listing views
27
Application actions
0
Application toolkit

Make your next move.

Prepare your resume, explore your fit, and draft a cover letter for this opportunity.

AI Summary

The role, at a glance.

This senior backend engineering role owns the design, performance, relevance, and reliability of ClickUp's enterprise search platform. The engineer will build and optimize real-time ingestion and search-serving services using Postgres and OpenSearch, including vector and semantic search capabilities. Core work includes relevance tuning, indexing, query optimization, quality measurement, and troubleshooting high-scale production issues. The role collaborates closely with AI, backend, and product teams and requires strong practical fluency with AI-enabled development. It is a US-based remote, full-time position for an experienced search or information-retrieval specialist.

Role DNA

A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.

Job Complexity

5/5
EasyHard

Pace & Pressure

5/5
RelaxedFast-paced

Autonomy Level

4/5
GuidedFull ownership

Communication Load

4/5
IndependentCollaborative
AI insightThe position requires deep production expertise in distributed search infrastructure, real-time indexing, relevance evaluation, and performance optimization under heavy load. Its direct impact on a core AI product capability and the expectation to solve complex scaling issues make it highly demanding.

Salary analysis

Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.

Estimated job median (per year)Highly competitive
$225,000
US market range (per year)$190k–$260k
AI insightThe employer discloses a yearly base-compensation range of USD 200,000–250,000, with a midpoint of USD 225,000. Estimated US market compensation for a senior search/backend engineer specializing in OpenSearch, real-time ingestion, relevance, and vector search is approximately USD 190,000–260,000 per year.

Core skills

Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.

Sample interview questions
How would you diagnose and improve poor relevance for an enterprise search query?

I would first segment failures using query logs, click or success signals, and labelled relevance judgments. I would inspect analyzers, query parsing, field boosts, synonyms, filters, and ranking features, then test targeted changes through offline metrics such as NDCG and precision before validating them with controlled production experiments.

Describe how you would design a real-time indexing pipeline for workspace data.

I would use durable change events from source services, idempotent consumers, versioned documents, retry and dead-letter handling, and backpressure controls. I would monitor freshness lag, indexing failures, throughput, and consistency, while ensuring that document deletes and permission changes are propagated safely.

What trade-offs do you consider when introducing vector search alongside lexical search?

Vector search improves semantic recall but can add latency, cost, and less transparent ranking behavior. I would use hybrid retrieval, apply metadata and permission filters, tune approximate-nearest-neighbor parameters, and combine lexical and vector signals through a measurable ranking strategy.

How would you investigate elevated latency in an OpenSearch cluster under heavy query load?

I would correlate latency with query shapes, shard distribution, CPU, heap pressure, garbage collection, disk I/O, cache behavior, and thread-pool saturation. I would then address the highest-impact bottleneck through query simplification, mappings and index tuning, shard rebalancing, caching, capacity changes, or load-shedding safeguards.

How do you make search-quality improvements safe to deploy?

I define baseline metrics and representative evaluation sets, test changes offline, and use feature flags or shadow traffic before rollout. I monitor relevance, latency, error rates, and user behavior after release, with a clear rollback plan if quality or reliability regresses.

This analysis is generated from the job description. Salary estimates, role characteristics and sample answers are guidance, not employer-provided facts.
Opportunity details

About this role.

At ClickUp, we’re building the future of work: the first truly converged AI workspace unifying tasks, docs, chat, calendar, and enterprise search, all supercharged by context-driven AI. We are an AI-native company. Every team member is expected to leverage AI daily, and we evaluate AI fluency as part of our hiring process. Join us and help redefine what’s possible. 🚀

ClickUp is seeking a talented and experienced Senior Search Engineer to join our team and help revolutionize our search capabilities. As a key member of our engineering team, you’ll be responsible for optimizing and enhancing our search functionality, which is a critical feature of our platform and underpins our AI efforts.

Your impact at ClickUp

As a Senior Engineer on the Search squad, you’ll be responsible for designing, optimizing, and scaling our search infrastructure. Our platform is built as backend services on top of Postgres and OpenSearch, focused on real-time search ingestion and serving. You’ll work hands-on with these systems to ensure users can instantly find exactly what they need across their workspace. Your expertise will directly contribute to making ClickUp the most intuitive and responsive productivity platform available.

Core Responsibilities

  • Design and implement robust search solutions that scale with our rapidly growing user base

  • Improve search relevance, accuracy, and speed to deliver the most relevant results to users at blazing fast speeds

  • Improve our real-time indexing pipelines to ensure search results remain up-to-date

  • Create measurement frameworks to evaluate and improve search quality

  • Build and enhance vector search capabilities to power next-generation search experiences

  • Collaborate with AI, backend, and product teams to integrate search into new features

  • Troubleshoot complex search-related issues at scale

  • Design and implement robust search solutions that scale with our rapidly growing user base

  • Improve search relevance, accuracy, and speed to deliver the most relevant results to users at blazing fast speeds

  • Improve out real-time indexing pipelines to ensure search results remain up-to-date

  • Create measurement frameworks to evaluate and improve search quality

  • Build and enhance vector search capabilities to power next-generation search experiences

  • Collaborate with AI, backend, and product teams to integrate search into new features

  • Troubleshoot complex search-related issues at scale

Technical Requirements:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

  • 5+ years of experience as a search engineer or in a directly related role

  • Hands-on production experience with OpenSearch or ElasticSearch (strongly preferred); Solr experience considered but less ideal given its age

  • Experience with high-scale, real-time data ingestion and search serving in a backend services context.

  • Proven ability to optimize query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning for search systems

  • Experience measuring and optimizing search quality

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Background in search ranking, relevance algorithms, and information retrieval

  • Hands-on experience with vector embeddings and semantic search implementations

  • Experience with TypeScript in backend systems

  • Track record of architecting search solutions that maintain performance under heavy load

  • Experience applying machine learning and NLP to enhance search relevance

Join Our Mission

At ClickUp, we’re committed to building the future of productivity software. As our Search Engineer, you’ll play a crucial role in shaping the core functionality of our platform and driving our AI initiatives forward. Join us in our mission to make the world more productive!

#LI-REMOTE

#LI-AK2
#LI-CC1

Equal Opportunity Employer

ClickUp is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.

Privacy Notice

ClickUp collects and processes personal data in accordance with applicable data protection laws. You can find further details by viewing our Global Candidate Privacy Notice.

If you are a Philippine Job Applicant, please also see our Philippine Data Privacy Notice for further details.

Visa Sponsorship

Please note we are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa for roles outside of engineering and product at this time. Sponsorship for engineering and product roles is not guaranteed, but is instead based on the business needs for that specific role at that time. Please reach out to the recruiter with any questions.

Fraud Alert

ClickUp Talent Acquisition will only initiate contact via an @clickup.com email or through our official careers portal on clickup.com. We will never request fees, payments, or sensitive personal information. Please disregard any offers received outside these channels and report them to support@clickup.com.

AI Processing Notice

ClickUp may use artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to help review and screen candidates’ employment applications against role-related criteria. These tools support, but do not replace, human decision‑making. If you have questions or need an accommodation in the recruitment process, please contact us at AskPeople@ClickUp.com.

Apply now >

This job listing has been manually reviewed by the Jobicy Trust & Safety Team for compliance with our posting guidelines, including verification of the company's legitimacy, accuracy of job details, clarity of remote work policy, and absence of misleading or fraudulent content.

Next step

Apply now.

Follow the employer’s application method and review Jobicy’s safety guidance before sharing personal information.

Did you apply?Let us know, and we’ll help you track your application.

Continue on the employer website

Protect your personal information and never pay to secure an interview or job offer. .

Log in to save
One quick step before you apply

Sign in to continue.

Sign in or create a free account to continue to the employer's application.

Applying is free. After signing in, return to this job and select Apply Now.
Add alert
Jobs Talent AI Tools Salaries
Menu