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Jobs at Kagi Search

We review every application, but this takes time. To increase your chances of a timely response:

  • Put effort like you mean it into your application
  • Clearly demonstrate why you're a strong fit for the role
  • Be detailed, but get to the point. Quality over quantity.

If you don't hear back quickly, it's not personal - we're just working through a backlog. Thanks for your patience and interest in Kagi.

Full-time positions

Product Manager - Search & Assistant

  • Clearly define goals and functionalities for features, set and validate outcome hypothesis, and write release notes
  • Collaborate with the development team to efficiently deliver features, while continuously improving the team's processes, productivity, and accountability
  • Demonstrate strong ownership by deeply understanding our objectives, forming a thoughtful perspective, and guiding development to achieve our mid to long-term goals
  • Gather community feedback from various channels and convert it into actionable insights
  • Communicate complex ideas in a clear manner, and promote engagement and collaboration in the team
  • Previous experience leading products

Head of Marketing

  • Innovative marketing strategies: Develop and execute creative, non-traditional marketing strategies that highlight Kagi's unique ad-free, privacy-focused search engine.
  • Brand positioning and storytelling: Strengthen Kagi's brand identity through compelling storytelling that emphasizes our commitment to providing a user-centric, ad-free search experience.
  • Community engagement and growth: Drive user acquisition and retention through grassroots marketing, partnerships, influencer collaborations, and community-building activities, avoiding digital ads to maintain our ad-free pedigree.
  • Collaborative campaigns: Work closely with product, engineering, and customer support teams to align marketing initiatives with Kagi’s core values and enhance the overall user experience.

Core Back-end Team

  • Advanced knowledge of the Crystal language.
  • Exceptional problem-solving and coding abilities.
  • Crafting products with care

Our tech lead Zac Nowicki recently gave a talk at Crystal Conf. Zac shares a summary of lessons, technology, ideas, and challenges after building a search engine product from the ground up in Crystal for the past three years. Watch the presentation here.

Core Front-end Team (we are currently full, check back later)

  • Passion for creating delightful and swift user interfaces.
  • Proficiency in HTML, CSS, and an understanding that JavaScript can be used sparingly to enhance, not create, product experiences.
  • You are comfortable not using any FE frameworks, and rather like to be in full control of the DOM and as close to browser as possible.

Fun fact: At Kagi, we prioritize speed, to the point where all functionalities of Kagi Search (except Stripe checkout and Maps) work perfectly without JavaScript. We see JavaScript as a tool to enhance the UX, not create it.

Core ML Team

  • Deep understanding of machine learning tools and technologies, whether in the build/deploy or apply/customize layers.
  • Demonstrable expertise with modern large language models (LLMs), their deployment and/or advanced prompting techniques.
  • Experience in building noteworthy projects utilizing machine learning.

Core Design Team (we are currently full, check back later)

  • Enthusiasm for diving deep into user feedback and discussions to improve UX.
  • Meticulous attention to detail in UX design.
  • A critical perspective on current search/assistant user interfaces, paired with a desire to revolutionize them.

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Key Responsibilities:

  • Ensure the reliability, performance, and scalability of Kagi's search engine and related services
  • Define and implement SLOs and SLIs (Service Level Indicators) to measure and maintain system health
  • Collaborate with development teams to design and implement fault-tolerant, resilient, and scalable architectures
  • Conduct thorough postmortems and root cause analyses to identify and prevent recurring issues
  • Automate incident response and remediation processes using tools like Runbooks or Playbooks
  • Implement and maintain comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and logging systems to proactively identify and resolve issues
  • Optimize system performance through capacity planning, load testing, and resource allocation
  • Continuously improve infrastructure and processes through automation, configuration management, and infrastructure as code
  • Participate in on-call rotations to provide rapid incident response and resolution
  • Foster a culture of knowledge sharing, documentation, and collaboration within the organization

Required Skills and Experience:

  • Strong experience with distributed systems, databases, and performance analysis.
  • Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Go, Python, or Java
  • Solid understanding of containerization technologies like Docker and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes
  • Experience with infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform
  • Knowledge of observability practices and tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, or Jaeger
  • Familiarity with chaos engineering principles and tools like Chaos Monkey or Gremlin
  • Understanding of networking concepts, including TCP/IP, DNS, and load balancing
  • Ability to design and implement resilient and scalable systems that can handle high traffic and data volumes
  • Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills to diagnose and resolve complex system issues
  • Strong communication and collaboration abilities to work effectively with cross-functional teams

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Experience with search engine architecture and related technologies
  • Knowledge of database performance tuning and optimization techniques
  • Familiarity with serverless computing platforms like AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions
  • Contributions to open-source projects or community involvement in the SRE or DevOps space

As an SRE at Kagi, you will play a critical role in ensuring the reliability, performance, and scalability of our search engine and related services. You will work closely with development teams to design and implement resilient architectures, automate operations, and proactively identify and resolve issues. Your focus will be on maintaining system health, optimizing performance, and continuously improving our infrastructure to support Kagi's growth and innovation in the search industry. You will be part of a collaborative and dynamic team that values knowledge sharing, automation, and data-driven decision-making.

Search Index Team

Key Responsibilities:

  • Develop and optimize our web crawling system to efficiently gather high-quality web pages
  • Design and implement robust indexing strategies to store and organize collected data
  • Create and refine ranking algorithms to deliver the most relevant search results
  • Collaborate with the Core ML Team to integrate machine learning techniques into the indexing and ranking processes
  • Monitor and analyze system performance, identifying areas for improvement and implementing optimizations
  • Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and advancements in web crawling, indexing, and ranking technologies

Required Skills and Experience:

  • Strong programming skills in languages such as C++, Java, or Python
  • In-depth knowledge of web crawling techniques, including handling various web page structures, navigation, and content extraction
  • Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and information retrieval concepts
  • Experience with distributed computing and large-scale data processing frameworks like Hadoop or Spark
  • Familiarity with search engine architecture and ranking algorithms
  • Ability to analyze and interpret large datasets to derive insights and make data-driven decisions
  • Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills
  • Strong communication and collaboration abilities to work effectively with cross-functional teams

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Advanced degree in Computer Science, Information Retrieval, or a related field
  • Prior experience working on search engine technologies at scale
  • Knowledge of natural language processing (NLP) and its applications in search
  • Contributions to open-source projects or research publications in the field of web search

As a member of the Search Index Team at Kagi, you will play a crucial role in building and enhancing our search engine's foundation. Your work will directly impact the quality and relevance of search results delivered to our users. You will have the opportunity to tackle complex challenges, innovate, and contribute to the development of cutting-edge search technologies in a fast-paced startup environment.

macOS/iOS developer

General conditions

  • Flexible working conditions; remote first culture.
  • Our journey is filled with exciting challenges and ever-evolving processes. It's a bit of a rollercoaster, not for the faint-hearted.
  • Our ambition is enormous, going against industry giants with a very small team. You will work a lot.
  • We are completely user funded. Kagi is currently used by one town worth of people. Do not expect VC backed/big-tech salary. Do expect equity as a part of compensation.

Send your CV to work@kagi.com. We’ll send a test project.

Part-time opportunities

Kagi R&D Team (aka Kagi Labs)

We are deeply committed to fostering a culture of research and development (R&D) at Kagi. Many of our groundbreaking technologies such as the Universal Summarizer, FastGPT or Small Web have their origins in our R&D initiatives. At any time we have 4-5 individuals working on R&D projects, with some eventually transitioning to full-time roles.

We are currently seeking full-stack developers who embody the following qualifications:

  • Proficiency in backend development with Python, Ruby, or Node.js, paired with expertise in crafting frontend interfaces using vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS.
  • Ability to dedicate 20 hours per week to R&D projects.
  • A proactive and self-organized working style, capable of thriving in a "fire & forget" mode.
  • A passion for building innovative projects from the ground up.
  • You can demonstrate a history of tinkering with product ideas/hacking projects together.

If you are eager to contribute to cutting-edge projects and grow with a dynamic team, we would be thrilled to hear from you.

Send your CV to labs@kagi.com. We’ll send a test project.

Who you would be working with

To get a sense of some aspects of the position, including the team you would be working with and the business itself, check out the Kagi Search community event, recorded live in December 2023 in Kagi discord.

Kagi community event