Suggested rewrite: Led a cross-functional initiative that improved [business outcome] by [measurable result], demonstrating experience relevant to this role...
Senior Software Engineer – Search Infrastructure
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- Remote from
- France
- Salary
- EUR 67,500–94k / yr
- Department
- Software Engineering
- Employment
- Full Time
- Experience
- Senior
- Published
- Apply before
- 27 Nov 2026
- Listing views
- 17
- Application actions
- 0
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The role, at a glance.
Algolia is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build and operate distributed infrastructure for NeuralSearch, combining keyword and vector search. The role focuses on indexing, storage, querying, production reliability, and troubleshooting high-impact system issues at substantial scale. It includes participation in an out-of-hours on-call rotation and requires strong engineering rigor around code quality and automated testing. Candidates should have production distributed-systems experience, familiarity with large datasets and high traffic, and excellent English communication; Go, Kubernetes, and SRE experience are valued. The role offers a fully remote option in France, with optional hybrid or office-based work in Paris.
Role DNA
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Pace & Pressure
4/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
4/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader EU market for similar roles.
Core skills
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Sample interview questions
I would separate ingestion, transformation, indexing, and serving into independently scalable components, with durable queues between stages. I would define idempotent writes, versioned index artifacts, backpressure controls, and observability for freshness, throughput, failures, and resource use. The design would also include safe rollout and rollback mechanisms for schema and ranking changes.
I would first assess scope through dashboards and traces, separating query-serving latency from network, storage, cache, and downstream dependency delays. I would compare affected traffic segments, recent deploys, query patterns, and resource saturation, then mitigate with rollback, traffic shaping, cache adjustments, or capacity changes as appropriate. After recovery, I would document root cause and add alerts or tests to prevent recurrence.
I use explicit timeouts, bounded retries with jitter, circuit breakers, idempotency keys, dead-letter handling, and graceful degradation. I also design for replication, controlled failover, and clear consistency guarantees rather than assuming all dependencies are always available. Regular failure testing and actionable telemetry are essential to verify these mechanisms.
I break work into small, observable releases behind feature flags and establish non-negotiable quality controls such as reviews, automated tests, and production metrics. I prioritize risks based on customer impact and use incremental delivery to gather evidence before broad rollout. When technical debt affects reliability or delivery speed, I make its cost visible and propose a focused remediation plan.
I treat on-call as a shared engineering responsibility and ensure services have useful runbooks, dashboards, alerts, and clear ownership. During an incident, I communicate status concisely, stabilize the service first, and coordinate escalation when needed. Afterwards, I contribute to blameless post-incident follow-up and automate recurring operational work.
About this role.
Algolia is the retrieval intelligence layer that turns intent into trusted, decision-grade outcomes. Powering more than 1.7 trillion queries a year for over 18,000 customers with millisecond latency and 99.999% reliability, we are the recognized leader for Search and Product Discovery by top industry analyst firms. The Algolia platform turns a company’s products, content, and business rules into data that humans, applications and AI agents can act upon. The result is trusted customer experiences with stronger conversions for measurable business impact.
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 Search team. We are responsible the cloud-based scalable architecture for NeuralSearch, our AI search engine, which incorporates both keyword and vector search. Our work 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 search at Algolia
- Be responsible for operations for search 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
#LI-Remote
Algolia does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, military status, veteran status, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.
The annual base salary compensation range for this role reflects market pay data within this location. The exact compensation offered for this role may vary depending on specific location and job-related knowledge, technical skills, and experience; and is only one part of our Total Rewards philosophy to compensate and recognize employees for their work.
Base Salary Pay Range
€67.500—€94.000 EUR
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!
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