EMEA: Staff Backend Engineer - Search Studio
Algolia (View all Jobs)
London, England
Interview Process
1. Take-home project 2. Onsite discussions and presentation
Programming Languages Mentioned
Python, SQL
#HybridRemote #FullRemote #PermanentPosition
At Algolia, we are passionate about helping developers & product teams connect their users with what matters most in milliseconds!
Algolia is looking for a Staff Back-end engineer to join the Guided Relevance team. You will be responsible for designing, developing and maintaining features that strive to automatically improve the relevance of our customers' search.
You will for example contribute to the Dynamic Re-Ranking feature, helping customers optimize their business KPIs by re-ranking search results on the fly based on past user interactions.
You will also work on our Query Categorization feature, improving and maintaining the feature so as to improve the end user experience of the customers implementations.
Other features you will contribute to are:
- Query Suggestions: Help users quickly find what they are looking for by suggesting relevant queries “as they type”
- Dynamic Synonyms Suggestions: Generate synonyms for our customers so that end users will always connect with what they were looking for
- AB Testing: Help customers evaluate the impact of our features and search relevance tweaks
As our systems keep improving and scaling, no two problems are ever the same. We expect you to be a pragmatic and resilient problem solver who isn’t afraid to think outside of the box. You will take ownership of complete projects and execute them.
The team is composed of engineers with different backgrounds and experience both in the industry and academia. Your experience, your knowledge and your perspective will add to this diversity, and help the team deliver products that make a difference.
You will strive in the Guided Relevance team if you are product oriented and you have experience architecting and maintaining projects with high load in any IAAS.
We are designing & maintaining customer facing APIs, data pipelines (streaming & batch), and ML models.
The main technologies we use in the team are:
- Languages: Go / Python
- Databases/Data Stores: GCS / BigQuery / CloudSQL (PostgreSQL)
- Infrastructure: Kubernetes (GKE) / PubSub / Redis (Memorystore)
We run & maintain what we build and are driven by the impact we have on our customers' business metrics.
As a Staff Backend Engineer, we expect you to bring significant experience acquired from a similar role in a former job. Not only will you lead projects in complete autonomy, you will also be accountable for planning ahead, and thinking in terms of what's best globally for the company rather than locally for your projects. This also means you are expected to ramp up on multiple projects, and orchestrate changes across projects and teams whenever necessary. As a staff engineer, you are also expected to be a technical leader, sharing your knowledge, and helping other engineers grow.
YOUR ROLE WILL CONSIST OF:
- Being a key contributor to the design, development, and ultimately operation of the Guided Relevance features at scale
- Being responsible for the quality and the robustness of the systems
- Sharing your expertise on software engineering, testing and deployment best practices
- Working with the product team to define the future of the automated relevance in the Search engine
YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF YOU HAVE:
- Have a minimum of 5 years of experience in a similar role.
- Are able to make autonomous decisions and take ownership for them
- Are a team player
- Have experience designing, operating and maintaining distributed systems in production
- Have experience working with high traffic APIs and pipelines and experience manipulating big datasets
- Preference for candidates with experience at our current stage and beyond (over 10,000 customers, $50-200M ARR range, high growth, lots of change and building internal infrastructure).
NICE TO HAVE:
- Familiarity with Go and/or Python languages
- Experience with GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes
- Working knowledge of relational databases and query authoring (SQL, BigQuery, PostgreSQL)
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.
REMOTE STRATEGY:
Algolia’s workplace strategy, Hybrid Remote, is designed to harness the power of the opportunities that remote work offers both employees and the company, while also providing an engaging in-office experience for the times when an employee is in an office. Our workplace approach reflects the belief that an employee’s impact, contribution, and output are more important than their physical location.
The majority of employees will be able to choose if, and when, they come into an office on a regular basis. There will be times when our people are asked to come into an office for “moments that matter:” activities like critical planning meetings and team social gatherings. Beyond those events, 80% of our workforce may choose the location from where they work in the country in which they were hired.
We have physical offices in San Francisco, NYC, Atlanta, Paris, London, Austin, and Bucharest. https://www.algolia.com/about/
ABOUT US:
Algolia prides itself on being a pioneer and market leader offering an AI-powered, API-First Search & Discovery platform that empowers 12,000+ businesses to compose customer experiences at internet scale that predict what their users want with blazing fast search and web browse experience. Algolia powers more than 30 billion search requests a week – four times more than Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex and DuckDuckGo combined.
Algolia is part of a cadre of innovative new companies that are driving the next generation of software development, creating APIs that make developers’ lives easier; solutions that are better than building from scratch and better than having to tweak monolithic SaaS solutions.
In 2021, the company closed $150 million in series D funding and quadrupled its post-money valuation of $2.25 billion. Being well capitalized enables Algolia to continue to invest in its market leading platform, to better serve its thousands of customers–including Under Armor, Petsmart, Stripe, Gymshark, and Walgreens, to name just a few.
The team is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris, London, New York, Austin, Atlanta, and Bucharest. To learn more, visit www.algolia.com.
WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR:
We’re looking for talented, passionate people to build the world’s best search & discovery technology. As an ownership-driven company, we seek team members who thrive within an environment based on autonomy and diversity. We're committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace. We care about each other and the world around us, and embrace talented people regardless of their race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability and socioeconomic background.
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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