Member of Technical Staff, Retrieval & Indexing

Parallel; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Generous equity

Visa sponsorships

401K plans

Daily lunch & office snacks

Dinner at the office

Unlimited vacation

Caltrain pass reimbursement

Job summary

Parallel, located in San Francisco, is looking for an experienced engineer to build and operate large-scale full-text indexing systems. The role involves making critical decisions on content, ensuring system performance, and deploying solutions that impact millions.

We are a fully in-person team that values creativity and consistency in tackling complex problems. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in information retrieval and distributed systems, committed to infrastructure that meets high demands.

Qualifications

• Deep intuition on information retrieval, distributed systems, and performance tuning.
• Ability to reason about trade-offs between retrieval methods.
• Commitment to helping agents find the right information.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate large-scale full-text indexing systems.
• Decide what content belongs in the corpus and build searchable structures.
• Anticipate and resolve potential bottlenecks in system performance.

Skills

Information retrieval

Distributed systems

Performance tuning

Job description

About us

Parallel is a web infrastructure company. Our products are used by leading businesses in sales, marketing, insurance, and coding to build best‑in‑class AI agents with flexible and powerful programmatic access to the web.

We’ve raised $230 million from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, First Round, and Terrain to build the web for AIs. We’re currently valued at $2 billion and we’re forming a world‑class team of engineers, designers, marketers, sellers, researchers, and operational experts to achieve our mission.

Job: You will build and operate the systems that let Parallel run its own large‑scale full‑text index over the web. You will work across the full lifecycle: deciding what belongs in the corpus, building the searchable structures that hold it, building the signals and models that judge source quality and freshness, and serving queries against the index quickly and economically. You will anticipate bottlenecks before they appear and ensure the architecture evolves to meet increasing demand.

You: Have deep intuition on information retrieval, distributed systems, and performance tuning. You like to reason about the trade‑offs between classical and neural retrieval, and between cost, reliability, and latency. You care about your work helping agents find the right information, and about infrastructure that can support products used by millions without breaking a sweat.

Life at Parallel

Our team works fully in‑person, between our Palo Alto HQ and San Francisco office. We’re a flat, talent‑dense organization dedicated to solving technical and creative problems.

We seek like‑minded individuals who share our passion for applying science, creativity, and consistency to big and complex problems with equally big outcomes. These are our values:

• Own customer impact: It’s on us to ensure real‑world outcomes for our customers.

• Obsess over craft: Perfect every detail because quality compounds.

• Accelerate change: Ship fast, adapt faster, and move frontier ideas into production.

• Create win‑wins: Creatively turn trade‑offs into upside.

• Make high‑conviction bets: Try and fail. But succeed an unfair amount.

Compensation & benefits

• Competitive salary
• Generous equity
• Visa sponsorships
• 401K plans
• Daily lunch & office snacks
• Dinner at the office
• Unlimited vacation
• Caltrain pass reimbursement