Strategic Overview
Senior Backend Engineer, Search at ClickUp is a dev opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as 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.
The role is listed for United States with remote working arrangement, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying. Relevant signals in the listing include Software Engineering, Senior.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
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
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- 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
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
- 5+ 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
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: USD 200,000 – 250,000 / yearly
Salary Benchmark
This role’s published compensation is compared with current employer-disclosed salary ranges for the same role at the Senior level in the same currency.
Benchmark uses active employer job postings in our database and excludes this listing. It is not a third-party salary estimate, and currencies are not converted.
Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
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
5+ 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!
#LI-REMOTE
#LI-AK2
#LI-CC1
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.
Privacy Notice
ClickUp collects and processes personal data in accordance with applicable data protection laws. You can find further details by viewing our Global Candidate Privacy Notice.
If you are a Philippine Job Applicant, please also see our Philippine Data Privacy Notice for further details.
Visa Sponsorship
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.
Fraud Alert
ClickUp Talent Acquisition will only initiate contact via an @clickup.com email or through our official careers portal on clickup.com. We will never request fees, payments, or sensitive personal information. Please disregard any offers received outside these channels and report them to support@clickup.com.
AI Processing Notice
ClickUp may use artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to help review and screen candidates' employment applications against role-related criteria. These tools support, but do not replace, human decision‑making. If you have questions or need an accommodation in the recruitment process, please contact us at AskPeople@ClickUp.com.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This dev opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches Software Engineering, Senior. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Design and implement robust search solutions that scale with our rapidly growing user base — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground Software Engineering, Senior, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
We organize source-provided information into this independent job-seeker overview. Compensation is shown only when the source provides it; the official listing remains the authority for current requirements and application instructions.