Principal Software Engineer

Algolia, Inc.; Paris; On-site; EUR 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Algolia is seeking an experienced Principal Frontend Engineer to define the multi-year technical vision for the frontend platform and to drive adoption across engineering teams and customers. You will lead cross-team architecture, shape the dashboard experience, and build a shared component library that scales across product surfaces.

You will mentor engineers, coordinate with product, design and backend partners, and push for performance, accessibility and robust API design.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience with a track record setting technical direction across multiple teams.
• Strong frontend expertise across modern web platforms and frameworks.
• Experience designing and maintaining public libraries, SDKs or design systems.
• Proven ability to lead engineers on large, cross-functional programs.
• Deep understanding of APIs, backend services and delivery infrastructure.
• Excellent communication and collaboration across product, design and engineering teams.
• Experience with cross-team UI consolidation and scalable architectures.
• Interest in conversational/agentic interfaces and AI-enabled UX.

Responsibilities

• Defining the multi-year technical vision for Algolia's frontend platform and turning it into roadmaps and projects for several teams.
• Shaping the evolution of the Algolia Dashboard, including architecture, component strategy and foundations for conversational and agentic UX.
• Driving convergence on a shared component library to reduce duplication across product surfaces.
• Designing scalable, highly available, high-performance frontend solutions, including areas outside of our direct control.
• Owning solutions end-to-end from delivery to adoption by engineering teams and customers.
• Shaping API design, versioning and backward-compatibility strategies for public libraries.

Skills

Frontend architecture

TypeScript

React

Design systems

Public libraries/SDKs

Cross-team leadership

Mentoring

API design

Full-stack awareness

Performance optimization

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