
Senior Backend Engineer, Search at ClickUp (United States)
ClickUp· United States· $200k–$250k·
Role details
ClickUp at a glance
ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity platform: tasks, docs, collaboration, and AI agents in one app.
ClickUp is an all-in-one work platform that combines tasks, docs, chat, whiteboards, goals, and dashboards in a single workspace, with an AI layer (Brain) and configurable AI agents wired through all of it. The pitch is convergence: keep every kind of work in one place so the software, and its AI, actually understands the full context.
$535M raised · latest: Series C · $400M · 2021 (at a $4B valuation) · backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Meritech Capital
Summary
ClickUp is seeking a Senior Search Engineer to design, optimize, and scale search infrastructure using OpenSearch/ElasticSearch. The role involves improving search relevance, speed, and vector search capabilities while collaborating with AI and backend teams to enhance the platform's core functionality.
Job description
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!
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.
Why work at ClickUp
- Culture & values: The company emphasizes grit, growth mindset (“grow 1% every day”), passion, and hard work. Core value: “Normal f*cking sucks” — a rejection of status quo thinking [clickup.com/careers]
- Impact: Employees are empowered to work across AI, product, and engineering — “you don’t need to be an engineer to dive deep into leveraging AI” [clickup.com/careers]
- Work model: Remote-friendly with offices in San Diego (HQ), United States, Canada, Ireland, United Kingdom, Australia, and globally [clickup.com/about]
- Perks: Generous PTO, health plans, retirement benefits, wellness programs, and parental leave [clickup.com/careers]
- Growth: The company explicitly hires for potential impact and supports “building your boldest career”; recent headcount of 1,529 signals continued scaling [tracxn.com, clickup.com/careers]