Staff Backend Engineer, Search
At ClickUp, we're building the future of work: the first truly converged AI workspace unifying tasks, docs, chat, calendar, and enterprise search, all supercharged by context-driven AI. We are an AI-native company. Every team member is expected to leverage AI daily, and we evaluate AI fluency as part of our hiring process.
About the role
As a key member of our engineering team, you'll be responsible for optimizing and enhancing our search functionality, which is a critical feature of our platform and underpins our AI efforts. You'll work hands-on with backend services built on Postgres and OpenSearch, focused on real-time search ingestion and serving, to ensure users can instantly find exactly what they need across their workspace.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement robust search solutions that scale with our rapidly growing user base
- Improve search relevance, accuracy, and speed to deliver the most relevant results to users at blazing fast speeds
- Improve our real-time indexing pipelines to ensure search results remain up-to-date
- Create measurement frameworks to evaluate and improve search quality
- 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
- Troubleshoot complex search-related issues at scale
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
- 7+ years of experience as a search engineer or in a directly related role
- Hands-on production experience with OpenSearch or ElasticSearch (strongly preferred); Solr experience considered but less ideal given its age
- Experience with high-scale, real-time data ingestion and search serving in a backend services context
- Proven ability to optimize query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning for search systems
- Experience measuring and optimizing search quality
Preferred Qualifications
- Background in search ranking, relevance algorithms, and information retrieval
- 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
Pay
Compensation range: $250K - $300K