Senior Software Engineer, Understanding

About the role

At Algolia, we are proud to be a pioneer and market leader in AI Search, empowering 18,000+ 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. Join the AI Search Group: Enhancing Core Search Capabilities, where you will own the design and implementation of critical understanding components that power search relevance. You will build and maintain production-grade pipelines that transform raw queries and user behavior into actionable signals. You will collaborate closely with machine learning experts and product teams to turn insights into high-impact features. Your work will directly influence how billions of queries are interpreted and ranked every month. If you are passionate about optimizing search understanding and applying AI thoughtfully to achieve measurable business outcomes, this role is for you.

Key facts

What you'll do

Design and develop ranking and understanding features that define how search queries are interpreted and improved.

Collaborate with a multidisciplinary team including front-end developers, machine learning specialists, and product managers to deliver cohesive search experiences.

Own the quality, reliability, and soundness of data pipelines that feed into understanding and relevance systems.

Analyze large-scale query logs and user behavior datasets to uncover patterns that drive relevance improvements.

Implement robust data processing workflows that operate reliably at high traffic and scale efficiently on major cloud platforms.

Partner with data scientists to operationalize AI-driven relevance experiments and measure their impact on search performance.

Apply rigorous engineering standards to ensure high code quality, comprehensive automated testing, and adherence to best practices.

Contribute to sensitive, customer-facing features such as query suggestions, dynamic synonym suggestions, AI re-ranking, and query categorization.

Leverage SQL and other tools to explore datasets and support data-driven decision making for continuous relevance optimization.

Maintain and evolve API services that expose understanding capabilities to internal and external customers with low latency and high availability.

Work within a fast-paced environment where you will be expected to prototype, iterate, and ship improvements quickly without compromising stability.

Act as an owner of the end-to-end reliability and performance of understanding systems in production, from monitoring to incident response.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software engineering experience in building and operating production systems.

Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as Go or Python, with a proven track record of writing clean, maintainable code.

Extensive experience designing, building, and operating data pipelines that process large datasets in high-traffic environments.

Deep understanding of how search relevance works, including query analysis, ranking signals, and evaluation methodologies.

Experience operating AI models or machine learning pipelines in production environments is highly valued.

Solid experience building and maintaining scalable API services that meet strict latency and availability requirements.

Rigorous attention to engineering best practices, including high code quality, automated testing, observability, and continuous delivery.

Excellent spoken and written English skills to communicate effectively with a global team and stakeholders.

Ability to work independently with an entrepreneurial mindset, taking full ownership of problems and driving them to resolution.

Comfortable making technical decisions and trade-offs in ambiguous situations while aligning with business goals.

Nice to have

Experience operating AI models in production environments.

Experience working with Kubernetes and container orchestration platforms.

Sensitivity to data-driven decision making and advanced exploration of datasets with SQL.

Sensitivity to end-user experience and empathy for how features impact real users.

Experience with major cloud providers such as GCP, AWS, or Azure in production workloads.

Practical notes

This is a full-time position based in Paris, France.

The compensation range displayed reflects market data for this location and role. Exact offers may vary based on candidate qualifications and experience.

Candidates must be eligible to work in France without sponsorship.

No relocation assistance or visa sponsorship is available for this role.

The position requires availability to work during standard business hours and participate in team meetings as scheduled.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the role is filled.