Job Description

Product Engineer, Search

We are hiring a Product Engineer, Search to own a developer-facing search endpoint end-to-end. This person will bridge retrieval/ranking research and polished API experience, turning search improvements into production features that developers can feel quickly.

This is a high-ownership role for someone who has built and shipped real search or retrieval systems in production, ideally at an early-to-mid stage startup. You will not be handed tickets by a PM. You will define what good looks like, prioritize independently, ship fast, measure impact, and own the developer experience.

What you’ll do

• Own a search API end-to-end, including response format, latency, error handling, filtering, documentation, and overall developer experience.
• Translate retrieval and ranking improvements into shipped product changes, such as better recall/precision tradeoffs, faster latency, stronger filtering, and clearer API behavior.
• Dogfood the product constantly by reviewing user feedback, GitHub issues, community discussions, and developer pain points.
• Run fast product experiments by forming hypotheses, instrumenting changes, shipping quickly, measuring results, and making decisions with imperfect data.
• Work closely with a small technical team and company leadership to shape a core product surface from the ground up.

What we’re looking for

• 3–12 years of experience as an IC product engineer, search engineer, IR engineer, or early startup engineer actively shipping search/retrieval products.
• Production experience with search, retrieval, ranking, or relevance at a developer-facing or API-first company.
• Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Vespa, Algolia, vector databases, or custom IR/retrieval stacks.
• Strong understanding of BM25, semantic search, hybrid retrieval, re-ranking, RAG, and recall vs. precision tradeoffs.
• Experience owning externally consumed APIs, including response shape, latency, filtering, error handling, and documentation.
• TypeScript and Node.js proficiency.
• Comfort with observability tools such as Datadog, Sentry, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, or similar.
• Cloud infrastructure experience across AWS, GCP, Azure, or comparable production environments.
• A strong product mindset: you care deeply about developer experience, API ergonomics, speed, reliability, and clarity.
• Startup ownership DNA: you have shipped end-to-end without depending on a PM, designer, or QA layer to define the work.

Strong signals

• Experience at a sub-200-person startup, especially Series A–C.
• Background in DevTools, AI infrastructure, search infrastructure, developer APIs, SDKs, or retrieval products.
• Public work in search, IR, AI infrastructure, OSS, GitHub projects, technical writing, or talks.
• Clear examples of improving search quality, latency, relevance, filtering, or developer-facing API design in production.
• Ability to describe technical tradeoffs clearly and pragmatically.

Compensation and logistics

Base salary range: $180K–$290K

Equity: 0.01%–0.15%

Location: Remote across the Americas