Upfynd is hiring a Search Engineer to own how people find software on our platform. With thousands of products across hundreds of categories and tags, a great search box is often the first and most important thing a visitor uses. You will make it fast, forgiving and genuinely useful.
Why this role matters
People rarely know the exact name of the tool they need. They type a problem, a half-remembered name or a category. Good search turns that into the right shortlist, and it has to respect Upfynd's rankings, which are earned by votes and reviews, never bought.
What your week looks like
- Own the search index for products, categories, tags and makers.
- Tune relevance using text matching, synonyms, typo tolerance and community signals such as upvotes.
- Build fast faceted filters for category, pricing, platform and launch date.
- Work with the AI team to add semantic and hybrid search where it clearly helps.
- Set up search analytics to learn what people look for and fail to find.
- Keep the index in sync with the catalogue as listings are added, edited and removed.
You will do well here if you have
- 3-5 years of software engineering, with at least 2 years working on search.
- Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Typesense, Meilisearch or Algolia.
- A solid understanding of relevance tuning and how to measure search quality.
- Strong backend skills in Node.js, Python or a similar language.
- A data-driven approach: you test changes rather than guessing.
Nice to have
- Experience with vector search and embeddings.
- Experience with autocomplete and query suggestions.
- Background in e-commerce or marketplace search.
Your first 30, 90 and 180 days
- 30 days: You understand the current search setup, its biggest gaps and how people actually use it.
- 90 days: You have shipped a relevance improvement and set up metrics that show whether search is getting better.
- 180 days: You own search end to end, with clearly better results for common queries and fewer zero-result searches.
Where and how you will work
This is a full-time, onsite role at our office on the 11th floor of O-Hub, Infocity, Bhubaneswar. You will sit with the people you build with, which keeps decisions quick and conversations easy. Your everyday tools will include GitHub, a search engine such as Typesense or Elasticsearch, Node.js and our analytics dashboards.
About Upfynd
Upfynd is a directory of new software, ranked by the people who actually use it. Every person gets one upvote per product, reviews come from real users, a person on our team checks every listing before it goes live, and nobody can pay to move up. Makers list and claim their products for free, and anything sponsored is clearly labelled and never touches rankings.
How to apply
Send us your CV along with a short note on a search problem you have worked on and what you learned. Just like every listing on Upfynd, every application is read by a real person, and we reply to everyone who applies.
Skills and tools
- Elasticsearch
- OpenSearch
- Typesense
- Relevance Tuning
- Vector Search
- Node.js
- Python
- Search Analytics