Quizlet
Sr. Backend Engineer
$167K–$219K
San Francisco, CA · Hybrid · Senior · Full-time · Posted Oct 23, 2026
- Experience
- Minimum 4+ years.
About the job
Build and operate Quizlet’s search infrastructure, from content ingestion and Elasticsearch indexing through low-latency retrieval services and support for evolving ranking systems.
What you'll do
- Develop and maintain content pipelines, Elasticsearch indices, and hybrid lexical/vector retrieval infrastructure.
- Build and operate backend query APIs, improving performance, reliability, observability, and zero-downtime index updates.
- Partner with product and applied ML teams on embedding workflows, retrieval experiments, and future ranking improvements.
What they ask for
- 4+ years of backend or data engineering experience, including ownership of production pipelines and/or services.
- Strong SQL and experience with data warehouses; proficiency in Python, Java, or Scala and an orchestration tool; experience with dbt.
- Production experience with Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, including index design and cluster tuning.
- Experience with REST or gRPC services, observability, Docker or Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure.
Nice to have
- Experience with Spark, Kafka, or Flink; practical vector search and embedding-model experience.
- Knowledge of retrieval evaluation, learning-to-rank, reciprocal rank fusion, or other vector databases.
Pay
$167K – $219K (USD; base salary)
Tools
Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, SQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Python, dbt
AI focus
Integrate embedding generation and hybrid lexical/vector retrieval; collaborate on retrieval improvements and future multi-stage ranking.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative