Staff Backend Engineer, Search

About the role

ClickUp is building an AI‑native workspace that unifies tasks, docs, chat, calendar, and enterprise search. As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Search squad, you will design, optimize, and scale the core search infrastructure that powers real‑time indexing and serving for millions of users.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement robust, high‑scale search solutions on top of Postgres and OpenSearch.
• Improve relevance, accuracy, and latency of search results, including vector‑based semantic search.
• Build and maintain real‑time indexing pipelines to keep results up‑to‑date.
• Create measurement frameworks to evaluate and continuously improve search quality.
• Collaborate with AI, backend, and product teams to integrate search into new features.
• Troubleshoot complex, large‑scale search issues.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 7+ years of experience as a search engineer or in a closely related role.
• Hands‑on production experience with OpenSearch or ElasticSearch (Solr experience considered).
• Proven ability to optimize query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning at high scale.

Required skills

• OpenSearch / ElasticSearch
• PostgreSQL
• Real‑time data ingestion and indexing
• Vector embeddings and semantic search
• TypeScript (backend)
• Machine learning and NLP applied to search relevance