About the role
What will you do at ClickUp?
At ClickUp, we're building the future of work: the first truly converged AI workspace unifying tasks, docs, chat, calendar, and enterprise search, all supercharged by context-driven AI. We are an AI-native company. Every team member is expected to leverage AI daily, and we evaluate AI fluency as part of our hiring process.
Join us and help redefine what's possible. 🚀
Machine Learning Engineer, Ranking & Retrieval
ClickUp is seeking an experienced Machine Learning Engineer to join our Search team. You'll own the ML systems that power search relevance for millions of users and ground our AI in the right context.
Your Impact at ClickUp
You'll own the full ML lifecycle for ranking and retrieval, from training through deployment and production serving. Our search indexes large-scale, user-generated content across a multi-tenant platform where permissions-aware retrieval is critical. You'll build the systems that decide what surfaces first.
Core Responsibilities
Train, deploy, and serve ranking models in production, owning the full ML lifecycle
Build ranker features, training pipelines, and offline evaluation frameworks
Design and scale hybrid retrieval combining lexical and vector search (including HNSW with disk offloading)
Run embedding inference at billions-of-documents scale
Improve query understanding through intent modeling and query expansion
Build permissions-aware retrieval that respects multi-tenant boundaries
Create measurement frameworks to evaluate and improve search quality
Collaborate with Search Infrastructure, AI, and backend teams to integrate ranking improvements across the platform
Technical Requirements
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field
5+ years of ML engineering experience focused on ranking, retrieval, or information retrieval
Proven full ML lifecycle ownership: training, deploying, and serving models in production
Hands-on ranker model training: feature engineering, pipelines, offline evaluation
Experience building hybrid (lexical + vector) retrieval systems
Experience running embedding inference at large scale
Strong query understanding fundamentals: intent modeling, query expansion
Preferred Qualifications
- Permission-aware retrieval and multi-tenancy experience
- Indexing large-scale user-generated content (not small or static datasets)
- Hands-on experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch
- Sharding, index management, and real-time ingestion at scale
- Background in NLP, semantic search, or agentic retrieval
- Experience with TypeScript in backend systems
- Join Our Mission
- At ClickUp, we're committed to building the future of productivity software. As our Search Engineer, you'll play a crucial role in shaping the core functionality of our platform and driving our AI initiatives forward. Join us in our mission to make the world more productive!
- #LI-REMOTE
- Equal Opportunity Employer
- ClickUp is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.
- Privacy Notice
- ClickUp collects and processes personal data in accordance with applicable data protection laws. You can find further details by viewing our Global Candidate Privacy Notice.
- If you are a Philippine Job Applicant, please also see our Philippine Data Privacy Notice for further details.
- Visa Sponsorship
- Please note we are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa for roles outside of engineering and product at this time. Sponsorship for engineering and product roles is not guaranteed, but is instead based on the business needs for that specific role at that time. Please reach out to the recruiter with any questions.
- Fraud Alert
- ClickUp Talent Acquisition will only initiate contact via an @clickup.com email or through our official careers portal on clickup.com. We will never request fees, payments, or sensitive personal information. Please disregard any offers received outside these channels and report them to [email protected].
- AI Processing Notice
- ClickUp may use artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to help review and screen candidates' employment applications against role-related criteria. These tools support, but do not replace, human decision‑making. If you have questions or need an accommodation in the recruitment process, please contact us at [email protected].
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