Award-winning recruiting firm delivering exceptional people, faster.
For CompaniesFor Companies
For CandidatesFor Candidates
Product Engineer (Search)
ApplyApply
Posted 15 days ago
Full Time
San Francisco, California
$180,000 Annually
About this role
Our client is building developer infrastructure for the AI era and is looking for a Product Engineer (Search) to own the developer-facing search experience end-to-end.This person will sit at the intersection of retrieval/search infrastructure and product engineering — taking ranking and retrieval improvements from concept to production quickly, without heavy process or layers of approval. The right candidate is highly autonomous, product-minded, and deeply technical in modern search and retrieval systems.
You’ll own how developers experience the search API including relevance, latency, filtering, observability, reliability, and usability. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys shipping quickly, iterating with real user feedback, and operating with a high degree of ownership.
What you’ll do
- Own the search API experience end-to-end including response structure, filtering, latency, reliability, and developer usability
- Translate retrieval and ranking improvements into production-ready developer-facing features
- Continuously improve search quality, relevance, precision/recall tradeoffs, and API performance
- Run fast product and ranking experiments with strong instrumentation and measurement practices
- Work directly with developer feedback from GitHub, Discord, and production usage patterns to improve the product
- Ship features independently from idea through production without reliance on large product or QA organizations
- Partner closely with engineering and infrastructure teams to improve observability, scalability, and operational reliability
- Contribute to documentation and developer experience improvements across the platform
Required Skillset
- 3–12 years of experience as a software/product engineer in startup or high-growth environments
- Proven production experience building or owning developer-facing search or retrieval APIs
- Strong understanding of search/retrieval fundamentals including BM25, semantic retrieval, hybrid retrieval, re-ranking, recall vs. precision tradeoffs, and RAG/search infrastructure concepts
- Experience working with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Vespa, Algolia, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, or custom IR/retrieval stacks
- Strong TypeScript and Node.js development experience
- Experience shipping end-to-end features in fast-moving startup environments with minimal process or oversight
- Comfortable owning API design decisions including response formatting, latency optimization, error handling, filtering, and developer usability
- Experience with observability and production monitoring tooling such as OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Grafana, or Sentry
- Experience working with cloud infrastructure in AWS, GCP, or Azure environments
Nice to Have Skillset
- Background in search infrastructure, information retrieval, or ranking systems engineering
- Previous experience at Series A–C startups or sub-200 person engineering organizations
- Experience optimizing retrieval quality and ranking systems for developer products
- Familiarity with vector databases and modern AI-native retrieval architectures
- Strong product instincts and ability to independently prioritize work without a dedicated PM
- Public contributions or visible presence in the retrieval/search community through open-source contributions, technical blogs, GitHub projects, conference talks, or research publications
- Experience building highly performant, low-latency APIs at scale
- Strong developer empathy and obsession with API usability and developer experience
