Principal Software Engineer
If you're a problem solver, able to think outside the box and eager to nurture others and learn from them, then this is your challenge!
As a principal engineer working across the entire frontend stack, from design-system primitives to product-level architecture, you will shape how developers build with Algolia and how customers experience our products.
In the Frontend Experiences team, we're on a mission to make it effortless for developers to build great search and discovery experiences on the front end, with libraries, components and tooling that are fast, accessible, and a pleasure to use. Our work reaches customers and their end users directly, on the web and on mobile, so the quality bar is high and the feedback loop is short.
Right now, that includes a cross-team, multi-quarter effort to evolve the Algolia Dashboard from a collection of product surfaces into one coherent environment: a new navigation and information architecture, a shared component foundation, and an interaction model that supports traditional configuration, conversational assistance and agentic workflows side by side.
The team is looking for an experienced individual who is well versed in defining, building and operating scalable architectures, with proven strengths in cross-team collaboration, taking solutions all the way through delivery to adoption by other engineering teams and by customers. You will play a pivotal role in architecting and implementing systems that play a central role across all of Algolia's front-end products, including libraries that run in production on thousands of customer sites. You will also play a role in training/mentoring and leading team members.
YOUR ROLE WILL CONSIST OF:
Defining the multi-year technical vision for Algolia's front-end platform, and turning it into roadmaps and projects that several teams can execute;
Playing an active role in the evolution of the Algolia Dashboard: shaping the experience architecture, the component strategy and the technical foundations for conversational and agentic UX, and partnering with engineering, product and design leadership to sequence delivery;
Driving convergence on a shared component library, reducing duplicated components and inconsistent patterns across product surfaces;
Designing and delivering solutions that will scale with significant volumes, be highly available, performant and resilient, including on pages and apps we do not control;
Owning solutions, taking them all the way through delivery to adoption by engineering teams and customers;
Shaping API design, versioning and backward-compatibility strategy for public libraries used by a large developer community;
Embodying technical expertise, that the team can refer to for advice or validation of a solution;
Setting engineering standards and best practices to be followed by engineers
YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF YOU HAVE:
Excellent communication and organization skills
10+ years of experience, with a track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams
Experience as a thought leader/standard-bearer for engineers, inside and outside the company (talks, open source, writing)
Proven experience leading engineers on large, cross-cutting projects
Extensive experience designing full stack solutions, interacting with microservice architectures, and strong grounding beyond the frontend (APIs, backend services, delivery infrastructure) to make sound end-to-end trade-offs
Deep frontend expertise (TypeScript, modern web platform, React and other major frameworks, accessibility, bundle size and runtime performance)
Experience designing and maintaining public libraries, SDKs or design systems, with a feel for API ergonomics and a track record of managing breaking changes
Experience building complex, high traffic & multi products web applications such as dashboards or admin consoles, and leading cross-team UI consolidation efforts
Interest in conversational and agentic interfaces (chat, streaming responses, tool-driven workflows) and in the architecture needed to support them
Familiarity with search UX patterns and with generative AI and agentic experiences is a plus
Preference for candidates with experience at our current stage and beyond (over 10,000 customers, $50-200M ARR range, high growth, lots of change and building internal infrastructure).
Algolia does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, military status, veteran status, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.
The annual base salary compensation range for this role reflects market pay data within this location. The exact compensation offered for this role may vary depending on specific location and job-related knowledge, technical skills, and experience; and is only one part of our Total Rewards philosophy to compensate and recognize employees for their work.
Base Salary Pay Range
€108.000—€135.000 EUR