Backend Engineer, Search
Job Description
Position Overview
Consensus is building the OS for research. Today, our academic search engine helps 8 million students, researchers, and doctors analyze scientific papers and complete literature reviews 10x faster. Our Series A was led by USV, with major participation from top AI investors, including Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Consensus has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Nature, and a16z as one of today’s most exciting and important AI startups. Our mission is to empower the world to understand, create, and apply good science. Help us build the future of research. In this role on the Backend, Search Team, you will help design, build, and maintain our core search stack, which includes working on new product features, large data pipelines, indexing pipelines, infrastructure, tooling and productionizing ML models that form the foundation of our product.
Key Responsibilities
- Ship end-to-end improvements like search features, agentic research flows, data pipelines, personalization/recommendations, internal tools, and new products.
- Help maintain and improve a large, complex search and data stack powering core Consensus functionality.
- Identify issues, fix bugs, and iterate quickly in response to user feedback, data, and changing product/business priorities.
- Partner closely with ML and product teams to productionize new ranking and recommendation models and features.
Required Qualifications
- 4+ years of full-stack engineering experience
- Track record of high-velocity delivery and ownership with minimal direction
- Strong Python and backend engineering skills
- Experience with distributed data processing (Databricks/Spark or similar)
- Previous experience with infrastructure, site reliability, SRE, log analysis, and debugging complex systems
- Interest in the product and mission: science, research, education
- Previous search experience is a bonus but not required for the role
Benefits & Perks
- Compensation: $170-$240k cash
- Compensation: Competitive Series A equity
Final offers are determined by multiple factors and may vary from the amounts listed above.