Senior Backend Engineer

Role overview

Join ClickUp as a Senior Backend Engineer to optimize and enhance the platform’s search functionality. You’ll design, scale, and improve the search infrastructure that powers more relevant, accurate, and fast results.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable search solutions that improve search relevance, accuracy, and speed as the user base grows
• Optimize search infrastructure: query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning
• Collaborate across AI, backend, and product teams to integrate search into new features and troubleshoot search issues at scale
• Build and enhance vector search for next-generation search experiences
• Create measurement frameworks to evaluate and improve search quality

Requirements

• 5+ years as a Search Engineer or in a closely related role
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Proven experience optimizing OpenSearch/Elasticsearch-based search systems (parsing, indexing, relevance)
• Experience with high-volume, distributed data processing
• Experience measuring and optimizing search quality
• Hands-on experience with vector embeddings and semantic search
• TypeScript backend experience
• Knowledge of information retrieval concepts and search evaluation metrics
• Excellent communication and cross-team collaboration
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Nice-to-haves

• Experience applying machine learning and NLP to improve search relevance
• Track record of architecting search systems that maintain performance under heavy load