Director, Engineering, AI Search
At Algolia, we’re proud to be a pioneer and market leader in AI Search, empowering 18,000+ businesses to deliver blazing-fast, predictive search and browse experiences at internet scale. Every week, we power over 30 billion search requests — four times more than Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo combined.
In 2021, we raised $150 million in Series D funding, quadrupling our valuation to $2.25 billion. This strong foundation enables us to keep investing in our market-leading platform and serving incredible customers like Under Armour, PetSmart, Stripe, Gymshark, and Walgreens.
About the Team
Algolia’s Engineering team builds the core infrastructure and product features that power real-time search and discovery for thousands of customers around the world. This includes backend services, frontend components, site reliability, and ML-powered capabilities. The team is distributed, collaborative, and committed to technical excellence and continuous learning.
As an Engineering Director, you will lead multiple teams or a critical product area, working closely with Engineering Managers, Product, and Design to deliver scalable, reliable, and high-impact solutions. You will play a key role in translating company strategy into execution, while building strong, autonomous teams and fostering engineering excellence.
Your Role Will Consist Of:
- Leading a group of engineering teams (via Engineering Managers and Senior ICs), ensuring alignment with product and company priorities
- Demonstrates strong AI leadership within the engineering organization by fostering a culture of continuous improvement and proactively evaluating and applying emerging AI technologies to enhance productivity, efficiency, and organizational performance across the broader technology function.
- Owning delivery, execution, and operational excellence for a defined product or platform area
- Partnering closely with Product, Design, and cross-functional stakeholders to shape roadmaps and ensure successful delivery of customer value
- Driving engineering best practices across system design, scalability, reliability, and performance
- Being a member of Algolia’s senior technology leadership team, with significant contributions to engineering excellence and the high performance of the global technology organization, extending beyond the immediate area of responsibility.
- Supporting and coaching Engineering Managers, helping them grow as leaders and build high-performing teams
- Contributing to organizational planning, including headcount, team structure, and quarterly/annual planning cycles
- Ensuring a strong culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement within your organization
- Acting as a bridge between strategy and execution, translating high-level goals into clear team-level priorities
- Serves as a trusted advisor to the CTO and SVP Engineering, providing strategic guidance on engineering leadership, organizational effectiveness, and cross-functional management initiatives across the technology organization.
You Might Be a Fit If You Have:
- 8–12+ years of engineering experience, including 3–5+ years managing multiple teams or managing through managers
- Proven experience delivering complex, cross-functional projects in a fast-paced, high-growth environment
- Strong technical background with experience in distributed systems, APIs, and scalable infrastructure
- Demonstrated ability to lead through others, empowering managers and senior engineers
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to align diverse stakeholders and drive clarity
- Experience operating in distributed or global engineering environments
Nice to Have:
- Experience in &l