How Algolia Reduces Latency For 21B Searches Per Month

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Algolia
Developer-friendly hosted search service. API clients for all major frameworks and languages. REST, JSON & detailed documentation.

By Josh Dzielak, Developer Advocate at Algolia.


Algolia Paris meeting room


Algolia helps developers build search. At the core of Algolia is a built-from-scratch search engine exposed via a JSON API. In February 2017, we processed 21 billion queries and 27 billion indexing operations for 8,000+ live integrations. Some more numbers:

  • Query volume: 1B/day peak, 750M/day average (13K/s during peak hours)
  • Indexing operations: 10B/day peak, 1B/day average (spikes can be over 1M/s)
  • Number of API servers: 800+
  • Total memory in production: 64TB
  • Total I/O per day: 3.9PB
  • Total SSD storage capacity: 566TB

We’ve written about our stack before and are big fans of StackShare and the community here. In this post we‘ll look at how our stack is designed from the ground up to reduce latency and the tools we use to monitor latency in production.

I’m Josh and I’m a Developer Advocate at Algolia, formerly the VP Engineering at Keen IO. Being a developer advocate is pretty cool. I get to code, write and speak. I also get to converse daily with developers using Algolia.

Frequently, I get asked what Algolia’s API tech stack looks like. Many people are surprised when I tell them:

  1. The Algolia search engine is written in C++ and runs inside of nginx. All searches start and finish inside of our nginx module.

  2. API clients connect directly to the nginx host where the search happens. There are no load balancers or network hops.

  3. Algolia runs on hand-picked bare metal. We use high-frequency CPUs like the 3.9Ghz Intel Xeon E5–1650v4 and load machines with 256GB of RAM.

  4. Algolia uses a hybrid-tenancy model. Some clusters are shared between customers and some are dedicated, so we can use hardware efficiently while providing full isolation to customers who need it.

  5. Algolia doesn’t use AWS or any cloud-based hosting for the API. We have our own servers spanning 47 datacenters in 15 global regions.


Algolia architecture diagram


Why this infrastructure?

The primary design goal for our stack is to aggressively reduce latency. For the kinds of searches that Algolia powers—suited to demanding consumers who are used to Google, Amazon and Facebook—latency is a UX killer. Search-as-you-type experiences, which have become the norm since Google announced instant search in 2011, have demanding requirements. Any more than 100ms from end-to-end can be perceived as sluggish, glitchy and distracting. But at 50ms or less the experience feels magical. We prefer magic.

Monitoring

Our monitoring stack helps us keep an eye on latency across all of our clusters. We use Wavefront to collect metrics from every machine. We like Wavefront because it’s simple to integrate (we have it plugged in to StatsD and collectd), provides good dashboards, and has integrated alerting.

We use PagerDuty to fire alerts for abnormalities like CPU depletion, resource exhaustion and long-running indexing jobs. For non-urgent alerts, like single process crashes, we dump and collect the core for further investigation. If the same non-urgent alert repeats more than a set number of times, we do trigger a PagerDuty alert. We keep only the last 5 core dumps to avoid filling up the disk.

When a query takes more than 1 second we send an alert into Slack. From there, someone on our Core Engineering Squad will investigate. On a typical day, we might see as few as 1 or even 0 of these, so Slack has been a good fit.

Probes

We have probes in 45 locations around the world to measure the latency and the availability of our production clusters. We host the probes with 12 different providers, not necessarily the same as where our API servers are. The results from these probes are publicly visible at status.algolia.com. We use a custom internal API to aggregate the large amount of data that probes fetch from each cluster and turn it into a single value per region.


Algolia probes


Downed Machines

Downed machines are detected within 30 seconds by a custom Ruby application. Once a machine is detected to be down, we push a DNS change to take it out of the cluster. The upper bound of propagation for that change is 2 minutes (DNS TTL). During this time, API clients implement their internal retry strategy to connect to healthy machines in the cluster, so there is no customer impact.

Debugging Slow Queries

When a query takes abnormally long - more than 1 second - we dump everything about it to a file. We keep everything we need to rerun it including the application ID, index name and all query parameters. High-level profiling information is also stored - with it, we can figure out where time is spent in the heaviest 10% of query processing. A syscall called getrusage analyzes resource utilization of the calling process and its children.

For the kernel, we record the number of major page faults (ru_majflt), number of block inputs, number of context switches, elapsed wall clock time (using gettimeofday, so that we don’t skip counting time on a blocking I/O like a major page fault since we’re using memory mapped files) and a variety of other statistics that help us determine the root cause.

With data in hand, the investigation proceeds in this order:

  1. The hardware
  2. The software
  3. Operating system and production environment

Hardware

The easiest problem to detect is a hardware issue. We see burned SSDs, broken memory modules and overheated CPUs. We automate the reporting of the most common failures like SSDs by alerting on S.M.A.R.T. data. For infrequent errors, we might need to run a suite of specific tools to narrow down the root cause, like mbw for uncovering memory bandwidth issues. And of course, there is always syslog which logs most hardware failures.

Individual machine failures will not have a customer impact because each cluster has 3 machines. Where it’s possible in a given geographical region, each machine is located in a different datacenter and attached to a different network provider. This provides further insulation from network or datacenter loss.

Software

We have some close-to-zero cost profiling information obtained from the getrusage syscall. Sometimes that’s enough to diagnose an issue with the engine code. If not, we need to look to profiling. We can’t run a profiler in production for performance reasons, but we can do this after the fact.

An external binary is attached to a profiler, containing exactly the same code as the module running inside of nginx. The profiler uses information obtained by google-perftools, a very accurate stack-sampling profiler, to simulate the exact conditions of the production machine.

OS / Environment

If we can rule out hardware and software failure, the problem might have been with the operating environment at that point in time. That means analyzing system-wide data in the hope of discovering an anomaly.

Once we discovered that defragmentation of huge pages in the kernel could block our process for several hundred milliseconds. This defragmentation isn’t necessary because we keep large memory pools like nginx. Now we make sure it doesn’t happen, to the benefit of more consistent latency for all of our customers.

Deployment

Every Algolia application runs on a cluster of 3 machines for redundancy and increased throughput. Each indexing operation is replicated across the machines using a durable queue.

Clusters can be mirrored to other global regions across Algolia’s Distributed Search Network (DSN). Global coverage is critical for delivering low latency to users coming from different continents. You can think of DSN like a CDN without caching - every query is running against a live, up-to-date copy of the index.

Early Detection

When we release a new version of the code that powers the API, we do it in an incremental, cluster-aware way so we can rollback immediately if something goes wrong.

Automated by a set of custom deployment scripts, the order of the rolling deploy looks like this:

  • Testing machines
  • Staging machines
  • ⅓ of production machines
  • Another ⅓ of production machines
  • The final ⅓ of production machines

First, we test the new code with unit tests and functional tests on a host that with an exact production configuration. During the API deployment process we use a custom set of scripts to run the tests, but in other areas of our stack we’re using Travis CI.

One thing we guard against is a network issue that produces a split-brain partition during a rolling deployment. Our deployment strategy considers every new version as unstable until it has consensus from every server, and it will continue to retry the deploy until the network partition heals.

Before deployment begins, another process has encrypted our binaries and uploaded them to an S3 bucket. The S3 bucket sits behind CloudFlare to make downloading the binaries fast from anywhere.

We use a custom shell script to do deployments. The script launches the new binaries and then checks to make sure that the new process is running. If it’s not, the script assumes that something has gone wrong and automatically rolls back to the previous version. Even if the previous version also can’t come up, we still won’t have a customer impact while we troubleshoot because the other machines in the cluster can still service requests.

Scaling

For a search engine, there are two basic dimensions of scaling:

  • Search capacity - how many searches can be performed?
  • Storage capacity - how many records can the index hold?

To increase your search capacity with Algolia, you can replicate your data to additional clusters using the point-and-click DSN feature. Once a new DSN cluster is provisioned and brought up-to-date with data, it will automatically begin to process queries.

Scaling storage capacity is a bit more complicated.

Multiple Clusters

Today, Algolia customers who cannot fit on one cluster need to provision a separate cluster and create logic at the application layer to balance between them. This is often needed by SaaS companies who have customers growing at different rates, and sometimes one customer can be 10x or 100x compared to the others, so you need to move that customer to somewhere they can fit.

Soon we’ll be releasing a feature that takes this complexity behind the API. Algolia will automatically balance data a customer’s available clusters based on a few key pieces of information. The way it works is similar to sharding but without the limitation of shards being pinned to a specific node. Shards can be moved between clusters dynamically. This avoids a very serious problem encountered by many search engines - if the original shard key guess was wrong, the entire cluster will have to be rebuilt down the road.

Collaboration

Our humans and our bots congregate on Slack. Last year we had some growing pains, but now we have a prefix-based naming convention that works pretty well. Our channels are named #team-engineering, #help-engineering, #notif-github, etc.. The #team- channels are for members of a team, #help- channels are for getting help from a team, and #notif- channels are for collecting automatic notifications.


Algolia Zoom Room


It would be hard to count the number of Zoom meetings we have on a given day. Our two main offices are in Paris and San Francisco, making 7am-10am PST the busiest time of day for video calls. We now have dedicated "Zoom Rooms" with iPads, high-resolution cameras and big TVs that make the experience really smooth. With new offices in New York and Atlanta, Zoom will become an even more important part of our collaboration stack which also includes Github, Trello and Asana.

Team

When you're an API, performance and scalability are customer-facing features. The work that our engineers do directly affects the 15,000+ developers that rely on our API. Being developers ourselves, we’re very passionate about open source and staying active with our community.


Algolia values


We’re hiring! Come help us make building search a rewarding experience. Algolia teammates come from a diverse range of backgrounds and 15 different countries. Our values are Care, Humility, Trust, Candor and Grit. Employees are encouraged to travel to different offices - Paris, San Francisco, or now Atlanta - at least once a year, to build strong personal connections inside of the company.

See our open positions on StackShare.

Questions about our stack? We love to talk tech. Comment below or ask us on our Discourse forum.

Thanks to Julien Lemoine, Adam Surak, Rémy-Christophe Schermesser, Jason Harris and Raphael Terrier for their much-appreciated help on this post.

Algolia
Developer-friendly hosted search service. API clients for all major frameworks and languages. REST, JSON & detailed documentation.
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Open jobs at Algolia
EMEA: Senior Data Engineer
France
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This position is open to remote work. If you are located somewhere not listed in this job description, we will be happy to discuss it !&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We’re on a mission to make Algolia a data-driven organization, and we’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to join our Data team and help us get there.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">​</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our Data team aims at helping other teams make better decisions by providing relevant data while ensuring its integrity and its consistency. This team has a significant impact as we work closely with business analysts on our Operations, Marketing, Product and Infrastructure teams to help them discover meaningful trends.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On a daily-basis, you will work on:</span></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Developing data pipelines and ETL workflows with Python, Airflow (AWS MWAA), Spark (AWS Glue) and Terraform.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Improving and maintaining our data warehouse (AWS Redshift).</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Build data models with dbt to be used by Analysts on business reports.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Interacting with Engineering and Business teams to understand requirements.</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are very open-minded and happy to experiment new technologies to achieve our goals and we try to continuously challenge our choices on that topic. You will have the opportunity to make some decisions going in that direction.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As a senior joining the team, your goal will also be to mentor junior engineers and help them grow to be successful at Algolia.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The current Data team is composed of a governance team (modeler, architect, quality specialist), data analysts and data engineers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With Algolia’s rapid growth, there will be many data-related challenges that will need to be tackled!&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Are you ready for the challenge?</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">RESPONSIBILITIES</span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Design, build, enrich and maintain our data pipelines.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Work with engineers and business analysts to capture and model data.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Monitor data integrity and growth.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Help improve our data lake and data warehouse architecture, to increase performance, simplicity and autonomy of the users.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Help analysts industrialize reports and dashboards to improve company productivity.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ensure every product is released with a data-driven approach.</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">​</span></p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">YOU MIGHT BE A GOOD FIT IF YOU HAVE</span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Strong experience designing and building data pipelines.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience orchestrating pipelines with Airflow.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Professional knowledge of Python.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience working with cloud platforms and architecturing them.&nbsp;</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience modeling data warehouses.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience about infrastructure topics specific to data engineering.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Interest in Big Data challenges (500Go and 750.000 files of new raw data every day).</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Interest in understanding the data and business requirements.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">An authorization to work in the EU.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Humble, curious, proactive and demonstrates a balance between creativity, scrappy and pragmatism.</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">​</span></p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">NICE TO HAVE</span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience using and managing AWS Redshift.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience with a parallel data processing framework such as Apache Spark.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience analyzing data quality using dbt.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience at our current stage and beyond ($50-200M ARR range, high growth, lots of change and building internal infrastructure).</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Excellent spoken and written English skills required.</span></li> </ul> <p>#LI-Hybrid #LI-Remote</p><div class="content-conclusion"><p>&nbsp;</p> <p>REMOTE STRATEGY:</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia’s workplace strategy, </span><strong>Hybrid Remote</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">, is designed to harness the power of the opportunities that remote work offers both employees and the company, while also providing an engaging in-office experience for the times when an employee is in an office. Our workplace approach reflects the belief that an employee’s impact, contribution, and output are more important than their physical location.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The majority of employees will be able to choose if, and when, they come into an office on a regular basis. There will be times when our people are asked to come into an office for “moments that matter:” activities like critical planning meetings and team social gatherings.&nbsp; Beyond those events, 80% of our workforce may choose the location from where they work in the country in which they were hired.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We have physical offices in San Francisco, NYC, Atlanta, Paris, London, Austin, Sydney and Bucharest. https://www.algolia.com/about/</span></p> <p>ABOUT US:</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia prides itself on being a pioneer and market leader offering an AI-powered, API-First Search &amp; Discovery platform that empowers 12,000+ businesses to compose customer experiences at internet scale that predict what their users want with blazing fast search and web browse experience. Algolia powers more than 30 billion search requests a week – four times more than Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex and DuckDuckGo combined.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia is part of a cadre of innovative new companies that are driving the next generation of software development, creating APIs that make developers’ lives easier; solutions that are better than building from scratch and better than having to tweak monolithic SaaS solutions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 2021, the company closed $150 million in series D funding and quadrupled its post-money valuation of $2.25 billion. Being well capitalized enables Algolia to continue to invest in its market leading platform, to better serve its thousands of customers–including Under Armor, Petsmart, Stripe, Gymshark, and Walgreens, to name just a few.&nbsp;</span></p> <p>The team is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris, London, New York, Austin, Atlanta, Sydney and <span style="font-weight: 400;">Bucharest</span>. To learn more, visit <a href="http://www.algolia.com." target="_blank">www.algolia.com.</a></p> <p>WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR:</p> <p>We’re looking for talented, passionate people to build the world’s best search &amp; discovery technology. As an ownership-driven company, we seek team members who thrive within an environment based on autonomy and diversity. We're committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace. We care about each other and the world around us, and embrace talented people regardless of their race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability and socioeconomic background.</p> <p>READY TO APPLY?<br><br>If you share our values and our enthusiasm for building the world’s best search &amp; discovery technology, we’d love to review your application!</p></div>
EMEA: Senior Data Engineer
London, England
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This position is open to remote work. If you are located somewhere not listed in this job description, we will be happy to discuss it.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We’re on a mission to make Algolia a data-driven organization, and we’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to join our Data team and help us get there.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our Data team aims at helping other teams make better decisions by providing relevant data while ensuring its integrity and its consistency. This team has a significant impact as we work closely with business analysts on our Operations, Marketing, Product and Infrastructure teams to help them discover meaningful trends.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">​</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">On a daily-basis, you will work on:</span></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Developing data pipelines and ETL workflows with Python, Airflow (AWS MWAA), Spark (AWS Glue) and Terraform.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Improving and maintaining our data warehouse (AWS Redshift).</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Build data models with dbt to be used by Analysts on business reports.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Interacting with Engineering and Business teams to understand requirements.</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are very open-minded and happy to experiment new technologies to achieve our goals and we try to continuously challenge our choices on that topic. You will have the opportunity to make some decisions going in that direction.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As a senior joining the team, your goal will also be to mentor junior engineers and help them grow to be successful at Algolia.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The current Data team is composed of a governance team (modeler, architect, quality specialist), data analysts and data engineers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With Algolia’s rapid growth, there will be many data-related challenges that will need to be tackled!&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Are you ready for the challenge?</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">RESPONSIBILITIES</span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Design, build, enrich and maintain our data pipelines.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Work with engineers and business analysts to capture and model data.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Monitor data integrity and growth.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Help improve our data lake and data warehouse architecture, to increase performance, simplicity and autonomy of the users.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Help analysts industrialize reports and dashboards to improve company productivity.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ensure every product is released with a data-driven approach.</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">​</span></p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">YOU MIGHT BE A GOOD FIT IF YOU HAVE</span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Strong experience designing and building data pipelines.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience orchestrating pipelines with Airflow.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Professional knowledge of Python.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience working with cloud platforms and architecturing them.&nbsp;</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience modeling data warehouses.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience about infrastructure topics specific to data engineering.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Interest in Big Data challenges (500Go and 750.000 files of new raw data every day).</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Interest in understanding the data and business requirements.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">An authorization to work in the EU.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Humble, curious, proactive and demonstrates a balance between creativity, scrappy and pragmatism.</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">​</span></p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">NICE TO HAVE</span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience using and managing AWS Redshift.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience with a parallel data processing framework such as Apache Spark.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience analyzing data quality using dbt.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience at our current stage and beyond ($50-200M ARR range, high growth, lots of change and building internal infrastructure).</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Excellent spoken and written English skills required.</span></li> </ul> <p>#LI-Hybrid #LI-Remote</p><div class="content-conclusion"><p>&nbsp;</p> <p>REMOTE STRATEGY:</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia’s workplace strategy, </span><strong>Hybrid Remote</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">, is designed to harness the power of the opportunities that remote work offers both employees and the company, while also providing an engaging in-office experience for the times when an employee is in an office. Our workplace approach reflects the belief that an employee’s impact, contribution, and output are more important than their physical location.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The majority of employees will be able to choose if, and when, they come into an office on a regular basis. There will be times when our people are asked to come into an office for “moments that matter:” activities like critical planning meetings and team social gatherings.&nbsp; Beyond those events, 80% of our workforce may choose the location from where they work in the country in which they were hired.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We have physical offices in San Francisco, NYC, Atlanta, Paris, London, Austin, Sydney and Bucharest. https://www.algolia.com/about/</span></p> <p>ABOUT US:</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia prides itself on being a pioneer and market leader offering an AI-powered, API-First Search &amp; Discovery platform that empowers 12,000+ businesses to compose customer experiences at internet scale that predict what their users want with blazing fast search and web browse experience. Algolia powers more than 30 billion search requests a week – four times more than Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex and DuckDuckGo combined.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia is part of a cadre of innovative new companies that are driving the next generation of software development, creating APIs that make developers’ lives easier; solutions that are better than building from scratch and better than having to tweak monolithic SaaS solutions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 2021, the company closed $150 million in series D funding and quadrupled its post-money valuation of $2.25 billion. Being well capitalized enables Algolia to continue to invest in its market leading platform, to better serve its thousands of customers–including Under Armor, Petsmart, Stripe, Gymshark, and Walgreens, to name just a few.&nbsp;</span></p> <p>The team is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris, London, New York, Austin, Atlanta, Sydney and <span style="font-weight: 400;">Bucharest</span>. To learn more, visit <a href="http://www.algolia.com." target="_blank">www.algolia.com.</a></p> <p>WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR:</p> <p>We’re looking for talented, passionate people to build the world’s best search &amp; discovery technology. As an ownership-driven company, we seek team members who thrive within an environment based on autonomy and diversity. We're committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace. We care about each other and the world around us, and embrace talented people regardless of their race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability and socioeconomic background.</p> <p>READY TO APPLY?<br><br>If you share our values and our enthusiasm for building the world’s best search &amp; discovery technology, we’d love to review your application!</p></div>
Manager - Site Reliability Engineering
Paris, France
<div class="section page-centered"> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>As Manager Site Reliability Engineer in Production Engineering team of Algolia, you will lead the PaaS (Platform as a Service) team of Site Reliability Engineers responsible for ensuring the reliability, availability, and scalability of multiple services which have an impact on all Algolia’s products.&nbsp;</div> </div> <div class="section page-centered"> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Your team will focus on Engineering Productivity, providing a Dev Experience and Toolings to increase the velocity of the whole organization.&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">You will be supported by experienced Individual Contributors to automate and secure services such as:</span></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CI/CD for multiple products and environments</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Observability (alerting, monitoring, log management)</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hosting Services (Cloud and Kubernetes based)</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Data Services</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Identity Services</span></li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>YOUR ROLE WILL CONSIST OF:</strong></p> <ul> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Collaborating with senior leadership to define the overall technical direction and strategy for the organization, and ensure that the SRE team's goals and initiatives are aligned with this strategy.&nbsp;</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">As well as building and maintaining strong relationships with stakeholders across the organization, as you represent the SRE organization in cross-functional meetings.&nbsp;</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">You also stay close to product and design teams to ensure that the user experience is always top of mind.</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">You are expected to provide leadership, guidance and mentorship to your team members, helping them to develop their technical skills and knowledge of best practices in site reliability engineering. You continuously evaluate and improve the performance of the SRE team, and you identify and implement initiatives to drive operational excellence and improve overall service reliability.</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Establishing and enforcing engineering processes and best practices that ensure high-quality, reliable, and scalable systems, as well as working with other teams to promote the adoption of these processes and practices across the organization.</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">You will be responsible for defining and maintaining service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your team's services, and you work with other teams to ensure that these SLAs and KPIs are being met. As well as leading cross-functional efforts to resolve complex technical issues and mitigate operational risks across multiple teams and domains.</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Along with your team you will help design and implement monitoring, alerting, and metrics systems to ensure the availability, performance, and reliability of your team's services, and you continuously refine and improve these systems.&nbsp;</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Collaborating with other technical teams to identify opportunities to automate processes, and design and implement automated tools and systems to support these processes.</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">As manager, you also manage the budget for your team, ensuring that resources are being used effectively and efficiently.&nbsp;</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Finally, you are responsible for documenting your team's projects and processes, and you ensure that this documentation is up-to-date and accessible to all stakeholders.</span></li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF :</strong></p> <ul> <li><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">4+ years of engineering management experience</span></em></li> <li><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">You are fluent in Agile methodology and can lead a project from the idea to Production</span></em></li> <li><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">You are comfortable managing a large team regrouping all seniority levels, and accompanying Individual Contributors in their growth and development</span></em></li> <li><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">You know how to deploy an application from laptop to production, are able to fully automate it, and you are comfortable with Production requirements (Observability, Alerting,...)</span></em></li> <li><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">You are knowledgeable in DevOps principles, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes (Administration and Utilisation)</span></em></li> <li><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">You are knowledgeable in Infrastructure as Code such as Terraform deployed to multiple cloud environments</span></em></li> <li><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">You are knowledgeable of at least one programming language (Python, Golang, Ruby.)</span></em></li> <li><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Full professional English proficiency</span></em></li> <li><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ability to make decisions and take ownership for them</span></em></li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>WE'RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO CAN LIVE OUR VALUES:</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">GRIT - Problem-solving and perseverance capability in an ever-changing and growing environment.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">TRUST - Willingness to trust our co-workers and to take ownership.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">CANDOR - Ability to receive and give constructive feedback.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">CARE - Genuine care about other team members, our clients and the decisions we make in the company.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">HUMILITY- Aptitude for learning from others, putting ego aside.</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>#LI-Hybrid #LI-Remote</p> </div><div class="content-conclusion"><p>&nbsp;</p> <p>REMOTE STRATEGY:</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia’s workplace strategy, </span><strong>Hybrid Remote</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">, is designed to harness the power of the opportunities that remote work offers both employees and the company, while also providing an engaging in-office experience for the times when an employee is in an office. Our workplace approach reflects the belief that an employee’s impact, contribution, and output are more important than their physical location.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The majority of employees will be able to choose if, and when, they come into an office on a regular basis. There will be times when our people are asked to come into an office for “moments that matter:” activities like critical planning meetings and team social gatherings.&nbsp; Beyond those events, 80% of our workforce may choose the location from where they work in the country in which they were hired.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We have physical offices in San Francisco, NYC, Atlanta, Paris, London, Austin, Sydney and Bucharest. https://www.algolia.com/about/</span></p> <p>ABOUT US:</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia prides itself on being a pioneer and market leader offering an AI-powered, API-First Search &amp; Discovery platform that empowers 12,000+ businesses to compose customer experiences at internet scale that predict what their users want with blazing fast search and web browse experience. Algolia powers more than 30 billion search requests a week – four times more than Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex and DuckDuckGo combined.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia is part of a cadre of innovative new companies that are driving the next generation of software development, creating APIs that make developers’ lives easier; solutions that are better than building from scratch and better than having to tweak monolithic SaaS solutions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 2021, the company closed $150 million in series D funding and quadrupled its post-money valuation of $2.25 billion. Being well capitalized enables Algolia to continue to invest in its market leading platform, to better serve its thousands of customers–including Under Armor, Petsmart, Stripe, Gymshark, and Walgreens, to name just a few.&nbsp;</span></p> <p>The team is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris, London, New York, Austin, Atlanta, Sydney and <span style="font-weight: 400;">Bucharest</span>. To learn more, visit <a href="http://www.algolia.com." target="_blank">www.algolia.com.</a></p> <p>WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR:</p> <p>We’re looking for talented, passionate people to build the world’s best search &amp; discovery technology. As an ownership-driven company, we seek team members who thrive within an environment based on autonomy and diversity. We're committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace. We care about each other and the world around us, and embrace talented people regardless of their race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability and socioeconomic background.</p> <p>READY TO APPLY?<br><br>If you share our values and our enthusiasm for building the world’s best search &amp; discovery technology, we’d love to review your application!</p></div>
Customer Success Engineer (Italian sp...
London, England
<div class="uil-fw-normal uil-ff-hind uil-fsz-16 lg:uil-fsz-18 uil-lh-bigger uil-color-grey-700"> <div class="section page-centered"> <div>** Please note we are currently looking for a CSE based either in the UK or France. This candidate must be fluent in both English and Italian.&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>The Customer Success Engineer (CSE) serves as a designated technical contact and a trusted advisor to Algolia’s customers. The CSE is the key member of the team, for all technical topics including customer onboarding, training and ensuring the resolution of complex issues with the full context and understanding of the customers specific product and technology environment. The CSE will orchestrate reactive and proactive support across Algolia Product Engineering teams as related to a customer’s operation and optimization of Algolia’s products. By maintaining a long-term relationship with their customers, a CSE gains an understanding of the customer’s overall technical environment, usage trends, and pain points - which is used by the CSE to effectively support customers.</div> </div> <div class="section page-centered"> <h3>YOUR ROLE WILL CONSIST OF</h3> <ul class="posting-requirements plain-list"> <ul> <ul> <li>Serve as the primary point of contact, develop and lead the technical relationships for a named set of accounts.</li> <li>Work closely with your account’s Customer Success Manager to ensure the customer’s long term health through a world-class support experience.</li> <li>Manage a diverse and complex scope of support issues across multiple client engagements.</li> <li>Work across the organization and escalate as necessary for confirmation of solutions or other options.</li> <li>Effectively troubleshoot, properly document, and regularly update customer’s support issues.</li> <li>Submit software bug reports to the Engineering team for problems needing attention.</li> <li>Partner with Product Teams and Engineering to develop subject matter expertise and serve as a product expert to your customers.</li> <li>Develop, maintain and present comprehensive case status reports to customers on a regularly scheduled meeting.</li> <li>Proactively identify and work with the customer to resolve technical risks and bottlenecks.</li> <li>Provide guidance on how to optimize the use of their environment.</li> </ul> </ul> </ul> </div> <div class="section page-centered"> <h3>YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF YOU HAVE</h3> <ul class="posting-requirements plain-list"> <ul> <ul> <li>Functional knowledge of at least one programming language such as: JavaScript, Java, PHP, C#, Objective-C, Swift, Ruby, Python</li> <li>Experience with REST API, database management, and web development technologies</li> <li>Strong desire to help people solve problems with the ability to explain complex technical&nbsp;concepts to a broad audience</li> <li>Proficiency in communicating complex technical issues to both technical and non-technical audiences via phone and email channels</li> <li>Excellence in time management, task prioritization, and evaluation of situational urgency</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Travel to customers' locations may be required</li> </ul> </ul> </ul> </div> <div class="section page-centered"> <h3>NICE TO HAVE</h3> <ul class="posting-requirements plain-list"> <ul> <ul> <li>Familiarity with iOS &amp; Android platforms.</li> <li>Experience supporting open-source projects &amp; their GitHub communities.</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Experience with Shopify, Magento, and&nbsp;<a href="http://salesforce.com/">Salesforce.com</a>&nbsp;a plus</li> <li>French speaking is a plus</li> </ul> </ul> </ul> </div> <div class="section page-centered"> <h3>WE’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO CAN LIVE OUR VALUES:</h3> <ul class="posting-requirements plain-list"> <ul> <ul> <li><strong>GRIT</strong>&nbsp;- Problem-solving and perseverance capability in an ever-changing and growing environment</li> <li><strong>TRUST</strong>&nbsp;- Willingness to trust our co-workers and to take ownership</li> <li><strong>CANDOR</strong>&nbsp;- Ability to receive and give constructive feedback</li> <li><strong>CARE</strong>&nbsp;- Genuine care about other team members, our clients and the decisions we make in the company</li> <li><strong>HUMILITY</strong>&nbsp;- Aptitude for learning from others, putting ego aside</li> </ul> </ul> </ul> </div> <p>#LI-Remote</p> </div><div class="content-conclusion"><p>&nbsp;</p> <p>REMOTE STRATEGY:</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia’s workplace strategy, </span><strong>Hybrid Remote</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">, is designed to harness the power of the opportunities that remote work offers both employees and the company, while also providing an engaging in-office experience for the times when an employee is in an office. Our workplace approach reflects the belief that an employee’s impact, contribution, and output are more important than their physical location.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The majority of employees will be able to choose if, and when, they come into an office on a regular basis. There will be times when our people are asked to come into an office for “moments that matter:” activities like critical planning meetings and team social gatherings.&nbsp; Beyond those events, 80% of our workforce may choose the location from where they work in the country in which they were hired.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We have physical offices in San Francisco, NYC, Atlanta, Paris, London, Austin, Sydney and Bucharest. https://www.algolia.com/about/</span></p> <p>ABOUT US:</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia prides itself on being a pioneer and market leader offering an AI-powered, API-First Search &amp; Discovery platform that empowers 12,000+ businesses to compose customer experiences at internet scale that predict what their users want with blazing fast search and web browse experience. Algolia powers more than 30 billion search requests a week – four times more than Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex and DuckDuckGo combined.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Algolia is part of a cadre of innovative new companies that are driving the next generation of software development, creating APIs that make developers’ lives easier; solutions that are better than building from scratch and better than having to tweak monolithic SaaS solutions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 2021, the company closed $150 million in series D funding and quadrupled its post-money valuation of $2.25 billion. Being well capitalized enables Algolia to continue to invest in its market leading platform, to better serve its thousands of customers–including Under Armor, Petsmart, Stripe, Gymshark, and Walgreens, to name just a few.&nbsp;</span></p> <p>The team is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris, London, New York, Austin, Atlanta, Sydney and <span style="font-weight: 400;">Bucharest</span>. To learn more, visit <a href="http://www.algolia.com." target="_blank">www.algolia.com.</a></p> <p>WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR:</p> <p>We’re looking for talented, passionate people to build the world’s best search &amp; discovery technology. As an ownership-driven company, we seek team members who thrive within an environment based on autonomy and diversity. We're committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace. We care about each other and the world around us, and embrace talented people regardless of their race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability and socioeconomic background.</p> <p>READY TO APPLY?<br><br>If you share our values and our enthusiasm for building the world’s best search &amp; discovery technology, we’d love to review your application!</p></div>
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