Senior Search Engineer, Index Team

• Build and maintain the systems that power Kagi's own search index — the layer that makes results meaningfully different from every other search engine. • Own pieces of the full pipeline: URL frontier, crawl job scheduling, document ingestion, processing, and indexed retrieval. • Work on index quality: understanding what's in the index, what should be, and what shouldn't. • Deep, unglamorous, high-impact work — the kind where finding a subtle scheduler bug after a week feels like a win. • Fully remote, any location.

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience in production information retrieval or search systems. • Prior experience with search index infrastructure, URL frontier systems, or crawl scheduling. • Deep expertise across the IR stack: index design, relevance scoring, ranking optimisation, near-duplicate detection, query engine architectures, and graph-based signal extraction. • Strong PostgreSQL skills — comfortable designing and optimising complex schemas and queries at scale, including large job and task tables. • Proficient in Python and/or Rust, Kagi's primary languages for this work. • Able to reason about large-scale data pipelines: throughput, correctness, idempotency, and operational reliability.

• Experience with observability tooling such as Prometheus or Grafana. • Comfort with Redis for distributed state and queue management. • Experience with distributed job scheduling or work queue systems — understands the failure modes and edge cases. • Experience operating systems where correctness and data quality are the primary constraints.

• Embed with the Search team to ensure index improvements translate into better results for users. • Design and improve the URL frontier and crawl job scheduling system — how Kagi decides what to index, when, and in what order. • Own and evolve the indexing strategy post-crawl and the ranking implementation. • Investigate and fix index quality issues: spam, stale content, deduplication, and coverage gaps.

• Fully remote role with no location restrictions. • Direct, high-impact work that shapes what millions of searches return. • A small, technically strong team working on a hard and meaningful problem.

Kagi is building a better web — a friendly internet where you can explore, learn, and interact with confidence, free from ads, tracking, and distractions. Products include Kagi Search, Orion Browser, Kagi Assistant, Kagi Summarizer, and Kagi Translate. The Index team builds and maintains Kagi's own search index: a hard technical problem involving distributed job scheduling, large-scale data pipelines, index quality engineering, and real-time monitoring.