Staff Backend Engineer (Search)

Role overview

Join ClickUp as a Staff Backend Engineer (Search). You will optimize and scale ClickUp’s search infrastructure, enabling faster, more accurate search experiences that support the company’s AI efforts.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement robust, scalable search solutions for a growing user base.
• Improve search relevance, accuracy, and speed through query, indexing, and tuning.
• Collaborate with AI, backend, and product teams to integrate search into new features and resolve complex search issues at scale.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to engineering best practices and high standards for quality and performance.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience as a search engineer or in a directly related role.
• Strong expertise in OpenSearch/ElasticSearch and search systems.
• Proven ability to optimize query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning.
• Experience with high-volume, distributed data processing.
• Ability to measure and optimize search quality.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• TypeScript experience in backend systems.
• Hands-on experience with vector embeddings and semantic search.
• Experience applying ML/NLP to enhance search relevance.
• Track record of architecting search solutions that maintain performance under heavy load.
• Knowledge of information retrieval concepts and search evaluation metrics.

Nice-to-haves

• Not explicitly stated, but strong alignment with search evaluation and semantic/ML-driven retrieval is emphasized.