Senior Backend Engineer, Search

ClickUp ClickUp · Enterprise · United States · Engineering

Senior Backend Engineer focused on optimizing and scaling search infrastructure, including OpenSearch/ElasticSearch, real-time indexing, relevance tuning, and building vector search capabilities to power next-generation search experiences. Collaborates with AI, backend, and product teams.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design and implement robust search solutions that scale with our rapidly growing user base
  2. Improve search relevance, accuracy, and speed to deliver the most relevant results to users at blazing fast speeds
  3. Improve out real-time indexing pipelines to ensure search results remain up-to-date
  4. Create measurement frameworks to evaluate and improve search quality
  5. Build and enhance vector search capabilities to power next-generation search experiences

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years of experience as a search engineer or in a directly related role
  • Strong expertise in search technologies, particularly OpenSearch / ElasticSearch
  • Experience measuring and optimizing search quality
  • Experience with high-volume, distributed data processing systems
  • Proven ability to optimize query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning for search systems
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
  • Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively across teams

Nice to have

  • 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
  • Knowledge of information retrieval concepts and search evaluation metrics

What the JD emphasized

  • revolutionize our search capabilities
  • critical feature of our platform
  • underpins our AI efforts
  • optimize query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning for search systems
  • architecting search solutions that maintain performance under heavy load

Other signals

  • improving search relevance
  • building vector search capabilities
  • integrating search into new features