Quizlet
Sr Backend Engineer
San Francisco, California · Senior · Full-time
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$26,149 more — $193,149 — moves this role to Level III and 3 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $193,149 would place this position at wage Level III. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
Community outcomes
No reports yet — be the first to help the next applicant.
About the role
- Integrate embedding generation into pipelines - batching, caching, and re-embedding workflows when models or content change - using off-the-shelf or hosted embedding models.
- Establish data quality and validation practices to catch pipeline failures and indexing issues before they reach production.
- Stay current on Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and retrieval-infrastructure best practices, evaluating what's worth adopting.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain data pipelines that ingest, transform, and load content into Elasticsearch indices at scale.
- Own index design - mappings, analyzers, sharding strategy, and lifecycle management - balancing indexing throughput, query latency, and storage cost.
- Design and maintain the backend retrieval/query services that sit in front of Elasticsearch - API design, request routing, caching, and query fan-out.
- Implement zero-downtime reindexing and index cutover strategies (aliasing, blue/green indices) to support continuous schema and data evolution.
- Collaborate with infrastructure/platform teams on cluster sizing, service scaling, and cost optimization.
- Support experiment rollout for retrieval and ranking changes, working with feature flagging or A/B test infrastructure.
- Collaborate with your manager and team to create a healthy work-life balance
Requirements
- Minimum 4+ years of experience in backend or data engineering, with hands-on ownership of production data pipelines and/or backend services.
- Strong SQL and experience with data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or similar).
- Proficiency in Python (or Java/Scala) for pipeline and service development, and experience with orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or similar).
- Experience with dbt for data transformation, modeling, and testing within the warehouse.
- Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch or OpenSearch in production - index design, mappings, ILM, sharding, and cluster tuning.
- Experience with service observability - tracing, metrics, and alerting (Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, or similar).
- Experience with batch and/or streaming data processing (Spark, Kafka, Flink, or similar).
Skills
- Comfort operating in cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), including cost and performance tradeoffs for search infrastructure.
Compensation
- Base Salary $167K - $219K
Benefits
- 20 vacation days that we expect you to take!
- Competitive health, dental, and vision insurance (100% employee and 75% dependent PPO, Dental, VSP Choice)
- Access to LinkedIn Learning and other resources to support professional growth
- Paid Family Leave, FSA, HSA, Commuter benefits, and Wellness benefits
- 40 hours of annual paid time off to participate in volunteer programs of choice
- Our culture is all about taking initiative, learning through challenges, and striving for high-quality work while staying curious and open to new ideas.
- Quizlet's success as an online learning community depends on a strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Company info
- The Search team (part of Coach & Orchestration) owns the full path from raw content to search results - the pipelines and infrastructure that get content indexed, the services that query it, and the systems that serve it with high relevance and low latency.
- We're looking for a Backend Engineer who can own this end-to-end: from data ingestion and Elasticsearch index design through the retrieval/query services that power search in production.
- You'll bring strong backend and data engineering fundamentals - pipeline design, orchestration, data modeling, and service/API development - with enough exposure to embeddings, vector search, and ML-adjacent concepts to support our hybrid (lexical + vector) retrieval today and our move toward ranking and relevance improvements tomorrow.
- You'll work at the intersection of data infrastructure, backend services, and search, ensuring our indices are fresh and our retrieval services are performant, reliable, and built to support increasingly sophisticated search.
- We're looking for a Backend Engineer who can own this end-to-end:
- from data ingestion and Elasticsearch index design through the retrieval/query services that power search in production.
- We strive to make everyone feel comfortable and welcome!
- We provide a transparent setting that gives a comprehensive view of who we are!
- At Quizlet, we're excited about passionate people joining our team-even if you don't check every box on the requirements list.
Equal opportunity
- As an equal opportunity employer and a tech company committed to societal change, we welcome applicants from all backgrounds.
This listing is sourced directly from Quizlet's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.