Product Engineer - Search (Remote)

Map Ssg

10d•Remote

About The Position

We are hiring a Product Engineer, Search to own a developer-facing search endpoint end-to-end. This person will bridge retrieval/ranking research and polished API experience, turning search improvements into production features that developers can feel quickly. This is a high-ownership role for someone who has built and shipped real search or retrieval systems in production, ideally at an early-to-mid stage startup. You will not be handed tickets by a PM. You will define what good looks like, prioritize independently, ship fast, measure impact, and own the developer experience.

Requirements

3–12 years of experience as an IC product engineer, search engineer, IR engineer, or early startup engineer actively shipping search/retrieval products.
Production experience with search, retrieval, ranking, or relevance at a developer-facing or API-first company.
Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Vespa, Algolia, vector databases, or custom IR/retrieval stacks.
Strong understanding of BM25, semantic search, hybrid retrieval, re-ranking, RAG, and recall vs. precision tradeoffs.
Experience owning externally consumed APIs, including response shape, latency, filtering, error handling, and documentation.
TypeScript and Node.js proficiency.
Comfort with observability tools such as Datadog, Sentry, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, or similar.
Cloud infrastructure experience across AWS, GCP, Azure, or comparable production environments.
A strong product mindset: you care deeply about developer experience, API ergonomics, speed, reliability, and clarity.
Startup ownership DNA: you have shipped end-to-end without depending on a PM, designer, or QA layer to define the work.

Nice To Haves

Experience at a sub-200-person startup, especially Series A–C.
Background in DevTools, AI infrastructure, search infrastructure, developer APIs, SDKs, or retrieval products.
Public work in search, IR, AI infrastructure, OSS, GitHub projects, technical writing, or talks.
Clear examples of improving search quality, latency, relevance, filtering, or developer-facing API design in production.
Ability to describe technical tradeoffs clearly and pragmatically.

Responsibilities

Own a search API end-to-end, including response format, latency, error handling, filtering, documentation, and overall developer experience.
Translate retrieval and ranking improvements into shipped product changes, such as better recall/precision tradeoffs, faster latency, stronger filtering, and clearer API behavior.
Dogfood the product constantly by reviewing user feedback, GitHub issues, community discussions, and developer pain points.
Run fast product experiments by forming hypotheses, instrumenting changes, shipping quickly, measuring results, and making decisions with imperfect data.
Work closely with a small technical team and company leadership to shape a core product surface from the ground up.