Product Engineer

Remote (United States)

This opportunity is for a Product Engineer focused on improving developer-facing search systems, APIs, and production search experiences in a fast-moving technical environment. The role combines product ownership, backend engineering, developer experience, and search infrastructure to deliver fast, reliable, and production-ready search functionality.

The position is responsible for turning retrieval and ranking improvements into polished developer products that are intuitive, scalable, and highly usable in production environments. This role owns the developer-facing search experience end-to-end, including API usability, latency, filtering, pagination, response consistency, error handling, and overall developer experience across search systems.

The role works closely with engineering and research teams to transform technical improvements into practical product functionality developers can immediately use. The position requires balancing technical depth with usability, making fast product decisions, running rapid experiments, improving production performance, and shipping features from design through deployment and iteration.

Employment Type: Full-time

Department: Product Team

Annual Salary: $180,000 – $290,000 per year

Equity: Up to 0.15%

What You’ll Do

• Build and ship developer-facing search improvements across APIs and production systems.
• Translate retrieval and ranking improvements into usable product functionality.
• Own the search API experience including response structure, filtering, pagination, latency, and error handling.
• Improve API ergonomics, usability, and overall developer experience.
• Create documentation, examples, and implementation guidance for developers.
• Use the API extensively before releases to identify friction points and usability issues.
• Review developer feedback, support tickets, GitHub issues, and community discussions related to search functionality.
• Work closely with Search, Information Retrieval, and Reinforcement Learning Engineers.
• Evaluate which technical improvements should become user-facing features.
• Push back on technically complex solutions that negatively impact usability or developer experience.
• Run rapid product experiments focused on improving search quality and performance.
• Measure outcomes, analyze performance, and iterate quickly based on real usage data.
• Improve response consistency, reliability, and production system behavior.
• Optimize search latency and infrastructure performance.
• Ship features from initial design through deployment and iteration.
• Operate effectively in a fast-moving technical environment with minimal process overhead.

What This Role Requires

• Strong understanding of developer experience and API usability principles.
• Experience building APIs used in production environments.
• Ability to balance technical quality with product usability.
• Hands-on engineering experience across backend systems and production infrastructure.
• Experience owning features from design through deployment.
• Strong coding and software engineering skills.
• Ability to work independently without requiring heavy product management direction.
• Experience translating technical or research improvements into product functionality.
• Strong understanding of search systems, ranking, retrieval, precision, recall, and query behavior.
• Experience operating systems under production load and managing latency or performance tradeoffs.
• Ability to make decisions and move quickly with incomplete information.
• Strong debugging, instrumentation, and production troubleshooting skills.
• Experience improving latency, response quality, and system reliability.
• Experience with Elasticsearch, Vespa, vector databases, semantic search systems, or related technologies is strongly preferred.
• Experience building developer-facing infrastructure products is strongly preferred.
• Strong communication skills across both engineering and product-focused discussions.

Preferred Backgrounds

• Engineers who have owned search or discovery systems at developer-focused companies.
• Full-stack engineers with strong backend and infrastructure experience.
• Engineers who have built APIs used by large numbers of developers.
• Professionals with experience improving search infrastructure and developer-facing product layers.
• Engineers experienced with semantic search systems, vector databases, or retrieval platforms.

What This Role Is Not

• This is not a purely research-focused position.
• This is not a backend-only infrastructure role without product ownership.
• This is not a role for engineers who avoid developer experience responsibilities.
• This is not a role requiring constant product management direction.
• This is not a narrowly specialized position focused on only one technical layer.
• This is not suited for slow product cycles or heavily process-driven environments.

Work Pace and Environment

• Work in a small, fast-moving, highly technical environment.
• Operate with speed, accountability, and strong ownership.
• Ship production-ready improvements quickly and iteratively.
• Balance technical depth with developer usability and product quality.
• Work closely with engineering and research teams on production systems.
• Take ownership of systems and features with minimal oversight.

Additional Benefits for U.S.-Based Full-Time Employees

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 100% employee coverage for medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 50% coverage for spouse and children.
• Employer-paid short-term disability insurance.
• Employer-paid long-term disability insurance.
• Employer-paid life insurance.
• Optional accident insurance.
• Optional critical illness insurance.
• Optional hospital indemnity insurance.
• Optional voluntary life insurance.
• Telehealth access.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Access to FSAs.
• Access to commuter benefits for U.S.-based employees.
• Pet insurance.

Additional Perks for San Francisco-Based Employees

• Access to San Francisco headquarters perks.
• Snacks and drinks.
• Team lunches.
• Collaborative startup office environment.
• Loaner electric bike for city transportation.

Interview Process

• Application review focused on shipped products, APIs, search systems, and developer-facing work.
• Introductory discussion focused on prior engineering and product experience.
• Technical and product deep-dive discussion focused on search systems and developer experience.
• Founder discussion focused on pace, ownership, working style, and candidate questions.
• Paid work trial lasting approximately 1–2 weeks.
• Work trial includes solving a real search product problem with production implications.
• Evaluation during the work trial is based on shipping speed, product judgment, and balancing technical quality with developer experience.
• Final decision after the paid work trial.

Why This Role Matters

This position is built for an engineer who wants to own the developer-facing search experience behind a fast-growing technical product. The role is responsible for improving API usability, search quality, system performance, and production reliability while turning technical improvements into polished developer experiences.