Senior Software Engineer, Understanding

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p>At Algolia, we’re 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.</p> <p>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.</p></div><p>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.</p> <p><strong>Join the AI Search Group: Enhancing Core Search Capabilities</strong></p> <p>The Relevance Group is dedicated to advancing the core search experience by improving both pre-query relevance (Understanding) and post-query relevance (Re-Ranking). We're responsible for key customer-facing features like Query Suggestions, Dynamic Synonym Suggestions, AI Re-Ranking, and Query Categorization. We’re looking for problem solvers with an entrepreneurial mindset—people who focus on outcomes and use data to drive decisions. If you're passionate about optimizing search relevance and applying AI thoughtfully to achieve measurable results for customers, we'd love to hear from you!</p> <p>The team is composed of engineers, 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.</p> <h3><strong>YOU WILL:</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Be a key contributor to the design and development of ranking &amp; understanding features</li> <li>Collaborate with a team that includes a variety of roles, ranging from front-end developers to machine learning specialists.</li> <li>Be responsible for the quality and soundness of our pipelines</li> </ul> <h3><strong>YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF YOU HAVE:</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Experience designing and operating pipelines in production</li> <li>Experience working with large datasets and high traffic</li> <li>An interest in solving Ranking challenges</li> <li>Experience in building and maintaining API services</li> <li>Rigor in high code quality, automated testing, and other engineering best practices</li> <li>Experience using one of the major cloud providers (GCP, AWS or Azure)</li> <li>Excellent spoken and written English skills</li> </ul> <h3><strong>NICE TO HAVE:</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Experience operating AI models in production environments</li> <li>Experience in Go or Python</li> <li>Experience in Kubernetes</li> <li>Sensitivity to data driven decision making, and exploring datasets with SQL</li> <li>Sensitivity to end user experience</li> </ul><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="description"><p>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.</p> <p>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.</p></div><div class="title">Base Salary Pay Range</div><div class="pay-range"><span>€67.500</span><span class="divider">—</span><span>€94.000 EUR</span></div></div></div><div class="content-conclusion"><hr> <p><strong>FLEXIBLE WORKPLACE STRATEGY:</strong></p> <p>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.&nbsp;</p> <p>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.<strong> 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.</strong></p> <p><strong>WE’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO CAN LIVE OUR VALUES:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>GRIT</strong> - Problem-solving and perseverance capability in an ever-changing and growing environment.</li> <li><strong>TRUST </strong>- Willingness to trust our co-workers and to take ownership.</li> <li><strong>CANDOR</strong> - Ability to receive and give constructive feedback.</li> <li><strong>CARE</strong> - Genuine care about other team members, our clients and the decisions we make in the company.</li> <li><strong>HUMILITY</strong> - Aptitude for learning from others, putting ego aside.</li> </ul> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR CANDIDATES - Re