Senior Search Engineer, Index Team

• Work on the systems that power Kagi's own search index, the layer that makes its results meaningfully different from everyone else's. • Own pieces of the full pipeline, from URL frontier and job scheduling through document ingestion, processing, and indexed retrieval, making it faster, fresher, and more reliable. • Work on index quality: understanding what's in the index, what should be, and what shouldn't be. • Take on a hard technical problem spanning distributed job scheduling, large-scale data pipelines, index quality engineering, and real-time monitoring, where the work directly shapes what millions of searches return. • Find satisfaction in the unglamorous work that makes a search index good, from scheduling logic that's wrong 0.1% of the time to deduplication that keeps coverage clean and monitoring that catches quality regressions before users do. • Work remotely from anywhere.

• Have 5+ years of backend engineering experience in production information retrieval or search systems. • Have prior experience with search index infrastructure, URL frontier systems, or crawl scheduling. • Bring deep expertise across the information retrieval stack, covering index design, relevance scoring and ranking optimisation, near-duplicate detection, query engine architectures, and graph-based signal extraction. • Have strong database skills, designing and optimising complex PostgreSQL schemas and queries including large job and task tables that need to scale. • Be proficient in Python or Rust, the primary languages for this work. • Reason about large-scale data pipelines across throughput, correctness, idempotency, and operational reliability.

• Have experience with observability tooling such as Prometheus or Grafana. • Be comfortable with Redis for distributed state and queue management. • Have experience with distributed job scheduling or work queue systems, including their failure modes and edge cases. • Have operated systems where correctness and data quality are the primary constraints.

• Embed within the Search team so index improvements translate into better results for users. • Design and improve the URL frontier and crawl job scheduling system, deciding what to index, when, and in what order. • Own and evolve the indexing strategy covering what gets indexed post-crawl, along with the ranking implementation. • Investigate and fix index quality issues including spam, stale content, deduplication, and coverage gaps.

• Work fully remotely from anywhere in the world. • Own pieces of a search index built from scratch rather than aggregated from the same sources everyone else uses. • Shape what millions of searches return. • Work across a product suite including Kagi Search, Orion browser, Kagi Assistant, Kagi News, Kagi Summarizer, and Kagi Translate. • Build for a product funded by its users rather than by advertising.

Kagi is building a friendly internet where people can explore, learn, and interact with confidence, free from ads, tracking, and distractions. The company builds advanced, user-centric technology designed to empower people rather than replace them. Its products include Kagi Search, Orion browser, Kagi Assistant, Kagi News, Kagi Summarizer, and Kagi Translate, each reflecting a commitment to a surveillance-free internet designed around the user.