Principal Software Engineer, Frontend Experiences

Job description

Algolia is the retrieval intelligence layer that turns intent into trusted, decision-grade outcomes. Powering more than 1.7 trillion queries a year for over 18,000 customers with millisecond latency and 99.999% reliability, we are the recognized leader for Search and Product Discovery by top industry analyst firms. The Algolia platform turns a company's products, content, and business rules into data that humans, applications and AI agents can act upon. The result is trusted customer experiences with stronger conversions for measurable business impact. 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 --- **FLEXIBLE WORKPLACE STRATEGY:** Algolia’s flexible workplace model is designed to empower all Algolians to fulfill our mission to power search and discovery with ease. We place an emphasis on an individual’s impact, contribution, and output, over their physical location. Algolia is a high-trust environment and many of our team members have the autonomy to choose where they want to work and when. We have a global presence with offices in Paris, NYC, London, Sydney and Bucharest, however we also offer many of our team members the option to work remotely either as fully remote or hybrid-remote employees. **Positions listed as "Remote" are only available for remote work within the specified country. Positions listed within a specific city are only available in that location - depending on the role it may be available with either a hybrid-remote or in-office schedule.** **WE’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO CAN LIVE OUR VALUES:** - **GRIT** - Problem-solving and perseverance capability in an ever-changing and growing environment. - **TRUST** - Willingness to trust our co-workers and to take ownership. - **CANDOR** - Ability to receive and give constructive feedback. - **CARE** - Genuine care about other team members, our clients and the decisions we make in the company. - **HUMILITY** - Aptitude for learning from others, putting ego aside. We’re looking for talented, passionate people to help build the world’s best search and discovery technology. We value autonomy, diversity, and collaboration. We’re committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone is respected and supported—regardless of race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability, or socioeconomic background. **IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR CANDIDATES - Recruitment Fraud Notice** We’ve recently seen an increase in recruitment scams targeting job seekers. To help protect yourself, please keep the following in mind: - Our open positions may appear on third-party job boards, but the **best way to apply safely** is directly through our **careers page**. - All genuine communication from Algolia will come from an **@algolia.com** email address. If you receive an email from someone claiming to work at Algolia who does not have an @algolia.com email address, please do not respond or share any personal information. - We’ll **never ask for payments, purchases, or financial details** during the hiring process. **READY TO APPLY?** If you share our values and our enthusiasm for building the world’s best search & discovery technology, we’d love to review your application!