Senior Software Engineer @ Meilisearch

Salary Range: 86987 to 106651 (Currency: EUR) (Pay period: per-year-salary)

About the company

Meilisearch is redefining the future of search for developers and end-users alike.

Our open-source, Rust-powered search engine delivers lightning-fast, typo-tolerant, and hyper-relevant results—out-of-the-box, with intuitive APIs and minimal configuration.

From powering the discoverability of 300,000+ AI models at Hugging Face to transforming retail experiences for Louis Vuitton, Meilisearch is trusted by thousands of organizations and developers worldwide.

Since 2018, we’ve grown into a remote-first team across 8+ countries, backed by leading investors including Felicis Ventures, CRV and Seedcamp. Our vibrant community drives innovation, with every design spec, SDK, and feature built transparently in collaboration with contributors.

Join us and help shape the next generation of search—where speed, simplicity, and developer experience come first.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Experience team and help us build the future of search technology. You'll be primarily working on Meilisearch, our blazingly fast and ultra-relevant search engine built in Rust.

We're seeking someone with a flexible, full-stack mindset - while you'll primarily work on our Rust-based search engine, you should be interested in and able to understand infrastructure, backend systems, and frontend needs to develop the most appropriate features for our production environment. Adaptability across our tech stack is essential so that you have the capacity to contribute where its most impactful.

As a key member of our Experience team, you'll work in mission-based squads to drive customer retention, attraction and activation initiatives. This role combines deep technical work with a strong customer focus - you'll collaborate closely with our support team to enhance the customer journey and ensure customers have an excellent experience with Meilisearch.

You will report directly to the Head of Experience & Engineering Operations while working hand-in-hand with other engineers and colleagues across the organisation.

Key Responsibilities

Core Engineering

Feature Development: Develop on features such as AI search, personalisation, enhanced data relationships, and search recommendations. Understand our customers, propose & implement new capabilities that support our their real-world needs.

Experience Optimisation: Balance performance and relevancy results to enhance the customer experience, ensuring fast, accurate search results that meet user expectations

Developer Experience & APIs: Design and build intuitive APIs that make Meilisearch a joy for developers to integrate and use

Production Reliability: Participate in on-call rotations and incident management to ensure system reliability and quick resolution of production issues

Some of our repositories: https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch https://github.com/meilisearch/heed https://github.com/meilisearch/charabia https://github.com/meilisearch/arroy https://github.com/meilisearch/deserr

Customer-Focused Collaboration

Support Partnership: Work alongside our Meilisearch Cloud support team to investigate & resolve complex customer issues and improve product experience

Knowledge Transfer: Coach and support team members on engine internals to enable better customer assistance. Identify patterns where we could make big impacts.

Customer Impact: Contribute to missions focused on customer retention and activation through both performance improvements and new capabilities

Our ideal profile

Soft skills

Excellent collaboration skills across disciplines. You will be partnering with backend, front end & infrastructure developers, PMs, documentation, and design teams.

Ability to balance technical depth with strategic thinking

Comfortable making tough technical decisions and aligning stakeholders

Adaptable and able to thrive in ambiguous situations

Flexible mindset, willing to tackle problems outside your initial scope

Hard skills

Must-Have

- 6+ years of experience in C/C++/Rust or equivalent systems programming languages

- Fluent in English (oral and written communication)

- Structured team experience: Proven ability to communicate effectively about your work, share knowledge, and work rigorously on collaborative projects

- Incident management skills: Experience with on-call responsibilities, troubleshooting production issues, and incident response procedures

- Rust interest & experience: Strong interest in the Rust language with hands-on experience implementing at least one Rust project (professional or personal)

- Full-stack flexibility: Interest in and ability to understand infrastructure, backend, and frontend systems to develop appropriate features for production environments

Nice-to-Have

- 2+ years of Rust experience, ideally with async Rust

- Low-level engineering expertise in disk usage, memory management, and CPU optimization

- Algorithmic experience and ability to implement efficient data structures and algorithms

- Search engine experience with full-text search, hybrid, indexing, or ranking systems

- Open-source contributions and community involvement

- API design experience with focus on developer experience

- Research aptitude - comfortable reading and implementing concepts from academic papers

- Advanced optimisation knowledge in SIMD-oriented optimisation or distributed systems

Why you'll enjoy working with us

- Hybrid working in Paris 🇫🇷, remote in EU or US East-coast timezone.

- Permanent full-time contract,

- Stock options,

- Protected Fridays & flexible working hours,

- If you’re working from home, we will provide either a stipend for you to equip yourself, or an access to Fleex (Europe),

- Access to a mental health platform (moka.care) + 6 sessions with a coach/trained therapist,

- We support physical health and provide either a membership or a stipend for your sports activities each month,

- 3 months paid parental leave,

- 6 weeks paid time off,

- Management training to freshly hired and newly appointed managers,

- We all get together at least twice a year for a company offsite.

Not sure you meet all qualifications? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other under-represented groups tend not to apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when, in fact, they often do! We strive to develop an inclusive work environment that reflects the diversity of our open-source community. We strongly encourage you to apply!

Senior Software Engineer

Rust & Full-stack

Meilisearch

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