Principal Software Engineer, Algolia
Frontend Experiences
€108-135k
AI search solutions
Be an early applicant
AI search solutions
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
€108-135k
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To help businesses and developers understand their online users and show them exactly what they need.
Role
Who you are
- If you're a problem solver, able to think outside the box and eager to nurture others and learn from them, then this is your challenge!
- The team is looking for an experienced individual who is well versed in defining, building and operating scalable architectures, with proven strengths in cross-team collaboration, taking solutions all the way through delivery to adoption by other engineering teams and by customers
- Excellent communication and organization skills
- 10+ years of experience, with a track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams
- Experience as a thought leader/standard-bearer for engineers, inside and outside the company (talks, open source, writing)
- Proven experience leading engineers on large, cross-cutting projects
- Extensive experience designing full stack solutions, interacting with microservice architectures, and strong grounding beyond the frontend (APIs, backend services, delivery infrastructure) to make sound end-to-end trade-offs
- Deep frontend expertise (TypeScript, modern web platform, React and other major frameworks, accessibility, bundle size and runtime performance)
- Experience designing and maintaining public libraries, SDKs or design systems, with a feel for API ergonomics and a track record of managing breaking changes
- Experience building complex, high traffic & multi products web applications such as dashboards or admin consoles, and leading cross-team UI consolidation efforts
- Interest in conversational and agentic interfaces (chat, streaming responses, tool-driven workflows) and in the architecture needed to support them
- Familiarity with search UX patterns and with generative AI and agentic experiences is a plus
- Preference for candidates with experience at our current stage and beyond (over 10,000 customers, $50-200M ARR range, high growth, lots of change and building internal infrastructure)
What the job involves
- As a principal engineer working across the entire frontend stack, from design-system primitives to product-level architecture, you will shape how developers build with Algolia and how customers experience our products
- In the Frontend Experiences team, we're on a mission to make it effortless for developers to build great search and discovery experiences on the front end, with libraries, components and tooling that are fast, accessible, and a pleasure to use. Our work reaches customers and their end users directly, on the web and on mobile, so the quality bar is high and the feedback loop is short
- Right now, that includes a cross-team, multi-quarter effort to evolve the Algolia Dashboard from a collection of product surfaces into one coherent environment: a new navigation and information architecture, a shared component foundation, and an interaction model that supports traditional configuration, conversational assistance and agentic workflows side by side
- You will play a pivotal role in architecting and implementing systems that play a central role across all of Algolia's front-end products, including libraries that run in production on thousands of customer sites
- You will also play a role in training/mentoring and leading team members
- Defining the multi-year technical vision for Algolia's front-end platform, and turning it into roadmaps and projects that several teams can execute
- Playing an active role in the evolution of the Algolia Dashboard: shaping the experience architecture, the component strategy and the technical foundations for conversational and agentic UX, and partnering with engineering, product and design leadership to sequence delivery
- Driving convergence on a shared component library, reducing duplicated components and inconsistent patterns across product surfaces
- Designing and delivering solutions that will scale with significant volumes, be highly available, performant and resilient, including on pages and apps we do not control
- Owning solutions, taking them all the way through delivery to adoption by engineering teams and customers
- Shaping API design, versioning and backward-compatibility strategy for public libraries used by a large developer community
- Embodying technical expertise, that the team can refer to for advice or validation of a solution
- Setting engineering standards and best practices to be followed by engineers
Our take
While in-site searching has been available for some time from web search servers such as Google and Bing, its functionality is limited due to it relying on general web scraping techniques which can miss relevant information. By contrast Algolia indexes only the company's site, allowing its search to serve accurate results extremely swiftly, which helps to drive sales conversions aside from making sites far more usable. The efficacy of this solution can be seen from its customer base of over 10,000 companies including the likes of Slack, Zendesk and Lacoste.
To diversify and increase the product range, Algolia have expanded into other real-time APIs such as product recommendations available for eCommerce websites. With the company performing extremely well over the last few years, Algolia have recruited key senior executives to further its growth. As the company continues to scale it seems likely that an IPO is not too distant a prospect.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Jul 2021
$150m
SERIES D
Oct 2019
$110m
SERIES C
Total funding: $334m
Company HQ
Barron Park, Palo Alto, CA
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