Staff Backend Engineer, Search
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 1, 2026. First seen by Alion on Jun 17, 2026. ClickUp scores A on the Alion truth index.
At ClickUp, we're building the future of work: the first truly converged AI workspace unifying tasks, docs, chat, calendar, and enterprise search, all supercharged by context-driven AI. We are an AI-native company. Every team member is expected to leverage AI daily, and we evaluate AI fluency as part of our hiring process. Join us and help redefine what's possible.
ClickUp is seeking a talented and experienced Senior Search Engineer to join our team and help revolutionize our search capabilities. As a key member of our engineering team, you'll be responsible for optimizing and enhancing our search functionality, which is a critical feature of our platform and underpins our AI efforts.
Your impact at ClickUp
As a Senior Engineer on the Search squad, you'll be responsible for designing, optimizing, and scaling our search infrastructure. Our platform is built as backend services on top of Postgres and OpenSearch, focused on real-time search ingestion and serving. You'll work hands-on with these systems to ensure users can instantly find exactly what they need across their workspace. Your expertise will directly contribute to making ClickUp the most intuitive and responsive productivity platform available.
Core Responsibilities
Design and implement robust search solutions that scale with our rapidly growing user base
Improve search relevance, accuracy, and speed to deliver the most relevant results to users at blazing fast speeds
Improve our real-time indexing pipelines to ensure search results remain up-to-date
Create measurement frameworks to evaluate and improve search quality
Build and enhance vector search capabilities to power next-generation search experiences
Collaborate with AI, backend, and product teams to integrate search into new features
Troubleshoot complex search-related issues at scale
Design and implement robust search solutions that scale with our rapidly growing user base
Improve search relevance, accuracy, and speed to deliver the most relevant results to users at blazing fast speeds
Improve out real-time indexing pipelines to ensure search results remain up-to-date
Create measurement frameworks to evaluate and improve search quality
Build and enhance vector search capabilities to power next-generation search experiences
Collaborate with AI, backend, and product teams to integrate search into new features
Troubleshoot complex search-related issues at scale
Technical Requirements:
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
7+ years of experience as a search engineer or in a directly related role
Hands-on production experience with OpenSearch or ElasticSearch (strongly preferred); Solr experience considered but less ideal given its age
Experience with high-scale, real-time data ingestion and search serving in a backend services context
Proven ability to optimize query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning for search systems
Experience measuring and optimizing search quality
Preferred Qualifications:
Background in search ranking, relevance algorithms, and information retrieval
Hands-on experience with vector embeddings and semantic search implementations
Experience with TypeScript in backend systems
Track record of architecting search solutions that maintain performance under heavy load
Experience applying machine learning and NLP to enhance search relevance
Join Our Mission
At ClickUp, we're committed to building the future of productivity software. As our Search Engineer, you'll play a crucial role in shaping the core functionality of our platform and driving our AI initiatives forward. Join us in our mission to make the world more productive!
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Equal Opportunity Employer
ClickUp is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.
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Please note we are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa for roles outside of engineering and product at this time. Sponsorship for engineering and product roles is not guaranteed, but is instead based on the business needs for that specific role at that time. Please reach out to the recruiter with any questions.
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