Staff Backend Engineer, Search

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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Unsure if you meet all the qualifications of this job description but are deeply excited about the role? We hire based on ambition, grit, and a passion for improving the way people work. If you think ClickUp is the company for you, we encourage you to apply!

At ClickUp, we assess every candidate based on the potential impact they can have. We hire the best people for the job and support each person’s journey to build their boldest career.

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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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.

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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 [email protected].