Staff Backend Engineer, Search

ClickUp ClickUp · Enterprise · United States · Engineering

Staff Backend Engineer focused on search infrastructure, relevance, and vector search capabilities to support ClickUp's AI-powered workspace.

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

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
  • 7+ 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

  • 7+ 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
  • Proven ability to optimize query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning for search systems
  • Hands-on experience with vector embeddings and semantic search implementations
  • Experience applying machine learning and NLP to enhance search relevance

Other signals

  • The role is responsible for optimizing and enhancing search functionality, which is a critical feature of the platform and underpins AI efforts.
  • 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.