How to Apply to Semrush

11 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 5 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • Semrush is a NYSE-listed SEO/online visibility SaaS company headquartered in Boston with roughly 1,200+ employees and around $350M in 2024 revenue.
  • The company was founded in Russia in 2008 but relocated its headquarters and operations to the US and EU (Prague, Limassol, Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam, Krakow, Tbilisi, Yerevan) following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine; the Russia-era footprint is largely gone.
  • Applications go through Semrush's custom careers portal at semrush.com/company/careers, not a third-party ATS like Greenhouse or Workday.
  • Interview processes typically run four to eight weeks across recruiter screen, technical/hiring-manager rounds, and 2 to 4 panel interviews.
  • Engineering hires at scale in Go, Python, Ruby on Rails (legacy), Kubernetes, AWS, Kafka, ClickHouse, and PostgreSQL — petabyte-scale crawling and indexing is a defining technical challenge.
  • CEO Bill Wagner (since July 2023, previously CEO of LogMeIn) leads a more operator-driven, public-company cadence while co-founder Oleg Shchegolev remains involved in technical strategy.
  • Compensation is competitive: Boston mid-level SWE roughly $140K-$180K total comp with RSUs in SEMR; Prague mid-level SWE roughly €40K-€65K; other EU offices competitive for their local markets.
  • Dogfooding is a real cultural signal — candidates who understand and can use Semrush's own toolkit consistently perform better in interviews, especially for product, marketing, and content roles.

About Semrush

Semrush Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: SEMR) is a publicly traded online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The company operates one of the largest commercial search and competitive intelligence indexes on the web, powering more than 55 tools spanning SEO (keyword research, rank tracking, site audit, backlink analysis, competitor research), content marketing, PPC research, social media management, local SEO, and market research. Semrush serves roughly 100,000+ paying customers, ranging from independent consultants and SMB marketing teams up to enterprise marketing organizations and agencies. Semrush was originally founded in 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov, with its earliest engineering operations rooted in St. Petersburg, Russia. The company grew for over a decade as a bootstrapped, profit-funded SaaS business before raising a late-stage round and IPO'ing on the NASDAQ in March 2021 under the ticker SEMR. Following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Semrush relocated its headquarters and the bulk of its corporate operations out of Russia, consolidating its center of gravity in Boston while relocating or re-platforming engineering talent into offices in Prague (Czech Republic), Limassol (Cyprus), Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam, Krakow, Tbilisi (Georgia), and Yerevan (Armenia). This transition fundamentally reshaped the company into a globally distributed organization with English as its corporate language. In July 2023, co-founder Oleg Shchegolev transitioned out of the CEO seat, and Bill Wagner — previously CEO of LogMeIn (GoTo) — was appointed Chief Executive Officer. Shchegolev remained involved in long-range technical and product strategy, but day-to-day leadership shifted to a more operator-driven public-company cadence under Wagner. Semrush reported roughly $350 million in revenue for fiscal year 2024 and employs approximately 1,200+ people worldwide. Semrush has been an active acquirer. It acquired Backlinko (a well-known SEO educational property founded by Brian Dean) in 2022, Kompyte (competitive intelligence) in 2022, Traffic Think Tank (SEO training community) in 2023, and most notably Third Door Media — the publisher of Search Engine Land, MarTech, and related industry events — in 2024, giving Semrush ownership of some of the most influential editorial properties in search marketing. The business competes primarily with Ahrefs (private, Singapore-based), Moz (acquired by Ziff Davis in 2021), and SimilarWeb (NYSE: SMWB). Semrush differentiates through breadth of toolkit, enterprise features, and the scale of its proprietary crawl and keyword datasets. Internally, the company is known for a 'we eat our own dogfood' culture — Semrush marketing teams use Semrush tools daily, which creates a tight feedback loop between product and go-to-market.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Submit your application directly through the Semrush careers portal at semrush

    Submit your application directly through the Semrush careers portal at semrush.com/company/careers — the company runs a custom/proprietary applicant tracking workflow rather than a major third-party ATS, so apply on the Semrush site rather than relying on LinkedIn Easy Apply.

  2. 2
    Select the office or remote designation carefully

    Select the office or remote designation carefully. Many roles are fully remote within a specific region (EU, US, LATAM, APAC), and applying to the wrong geography can disqualify you for tax/employment reasons.

  3. 3
    Expect an initial recruiter screen within one to two weeks, typically a 30-minut

    Expect an initial recruiter screen within one to two weeks, typically a 30-minute conversation covering motivation, relocation/remote eligibility, compensation expectations, and language comfort (English is required; additional languages can help for regional roles).

  4. 4
    For engineering roles, the next step is usually a technical screen

    For engineering roles, the next step is usually a technical screen — either a live coding interview or a take-home assignment focused on the language and stack the team uses (Go, Python, or Ruby for backend; JavaScript/TypeScript for frontend).

  5. 5
    Hiring manager interview follows, focused on domain fit, scope of past work, and

    Hiring manager interview follows, focused on domain fit, scope of past work, and alignment with the team's roadmap. For product/design roles this stage often includes portfolio review and a product strategy discussion.

  6. 6
    Panel rounds (2 to 4 sessions) are then scheduled

    Panel rounds (2 to 4 sessions) are then scheduled. Engineering panels cover system design at crawl/index scale, coding depth, and behavioral/values fit. Product, design, and marketing panels use scenario-based cases, portfolio walkthroughs, and cross-functional partner interviews.

  7. 7
    For senior and staff-level roles, expect an executive round with a VP or the fun

    For senior and staff-level roles, expect an executive round with a VP or the functional leader, often conducted via video due to the distributed nature of the company.

  8. 8
    Reference checks are standard for senior roles and are typically back-channeled

    Reference checks are standard for senior roles and are typically back-channeled in addition to the references you provide.

  9. 9
    Offers are extended verbally first, followed by a written offer that details bas

    Offers are extended verbally first, followed by a written offer that details base salary, RSU grant (Semrush is public, so equity is in SEMR shares), bonus target, and benefits specific to your country of employment.

  10. 10
    End-to-end the process typically runs four to eight weeks

    End-to-end the process typically runs four to eight weeks. Delays are most commonly caused by timezone coordination across Boston, Prague, and remote panelists rather than internal indecision.

Resume Tips for Semrush

recommended

Lead with measurable SEO, marketing, or product outcomes if applying to go-to-ma

Lead with measurable SEO, marketing, or product outcomes if applying to go-to-market roles — traffic growth, ranking improvements, pipeline sourced, or conversion lift, with baseline and delta numbers.

recommended

Name the tools you've used by name

Name the tools you've used by name. For marketers: Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, Screaming Frog, SE Ranking, Google Analytics (GA4), Google Search Console, Looker Studio, HubSpot, Salesforce. Recruiters scan for these explicitly.

recommended

For software engineering, call out large-scale distributed systems experience —

For software engineering, call out large-scale distributed systems experience — Kubernetes, AWS, Kafka, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, and especially any work on web crawling, indexing, or search infrastructure.

recommended

Include specific scale numbers for engineers: requests per second, URLs crawled

Include specific scale numbers for engineers: requests per second, URLs crawled per day, data volume (TB/PB), cluster size, or query latency percentiles. Semrush operates at petabyte scale and hires against that bar.

recommended

Mention Go, Python, and Ruby on Rails explicitly if you have them

Mention Go, Python, and Ruby on Rails explicitly if you have them. Go is the dominant newer-service language, Python is heavy in data/ML, and Ruby on Rails still powers significant legacy surface area.

recommended

For data science and ML roles, highlight NLP, search relevance, ranking models,

For data science and ML roles, highlight NLP, search relevance, ranking models, or content understanding work. Semrush invests heavily in these areas and is ramping AI/LLM-powered features in 2024-2025.

recommended

Keep the resume to one page for fewer than eight years of experience and two pag

Keep the resume to one page for fewer than eight years of experience and two pages for more senior candidates. Use a clean, single-column ATS-safe layout — no tables, text boxes, or graphics.

recommended

If you are applying to a Prague, Limassol, Barcelona, or other EU office, includ

If you are applying to a Prague, Limassol, Barcelona, or other EU office, include your work authorization status plainly (EU citizen, permanent resident, requires sponsorship). Sponsorship is rare; local authorization is a strong signal.

recommended

Call out any prior experience at competitor or adjacent companies (Ahrefs, Moz,

Call out any prior experience at competitor or adjacent companies (Ahrefs, Moz, SimilarWeb, HubSpot, Mailchimp/Intuit, Hootsuite) — this is treated as directly relevant domain experience.

recommended

Demonstrate 'dogfooding' instincts where possible: a personal site with real SEO

Demonstrate 'dogfooding' instincts where possible: a personal site with real SEO traction, an open-source crawler, a data pipeline project, or published technical writing will meaningfully strengthen your file.

ATS System: Semrush Custom Careers Portal

Semrush uses its own custom/proprietary careers portal at semrush.com/company/careers rather than a major third-party ATS like Greenhouse, Lever, or Workday. Applications are submitted directly on the Semrush domain, and internal recruiters manage the pipeline through Semrush's own tooling. This means resume parsing is generally more forgiving of layout than strict template-based ATSs, but you should still use conventional section headings and a single-column layout to be safe.

  • Apply directly on semrush.com/company/careers rather than through LinkedIn or aggregators — the custom portal is the canonical application path and some aggregator listings are stale.
  • Use standard section headings: Summary, Experience, Skills, Education. Exotic headings can confuse any parser.
  • Submit a .docx or text-based PDF. Avoid image-based PDFs and scanned documents, which lose keyword matching entirely.
  • Mirror keywords from the specific job description — tool names, methodologies, and seniority indicators — in your Experience section rather than just a skills list.
  • Fill in all portal fields even if you've attached a resume. Custom portals often use structured fields (years of experience, location, authorization) for filtering independent of the resume file.
  • Use a professional email address, include a LinkedIn URL, and for engineering/data roles include a GitHub or portfolio link in the header.

Interview Culture

Semrush's interview culture reflects its roots as an engineering-heavy, data-driven SaaS company that has transitioned from a founder-led Russian startup into a public, globally distributed operator-led organization. Interviews lean practical and scenario-based rather than trivia-heavy. Engineering interviews emphasize realistic problems — designing a system to crawl, dedupe, and index billions of URLs, or to serve ranking queries at sub-second latency — rather than LeetCode gotchas, though fundamental data structures and algorithms still come up. Candidates should be ready to reason about ClickHouse vs Postgres tradeoffs, Kafka-based pipelines, Kubernetes workload design, and AWS cost/performance decisions at scale. Product, design, and marketing interviews rely heavily on portfolio and case-based discussion. Expect to walk through a past project end-to-end — goal, constraints, decisions, outcome — and to be challenged on tradeoffs. For product roles, PMs often present a lightweight strategy case connected to the Semrush toolkit or a competitor like Ahrefs or Moz. Marketers should expect SEO/content case questions and are frequently asked how they would use Semrush itself to diagnose and act on a given scenario (the dogfooding signal is explicit). Culturally, teams are multilingual and distributed across Boston, Prague, Limassol, Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam, Krakow, Buenos Aires, Taipei, and remote. English is the corporate language, and communication clarity across timezones is a real evaluation criterion for senior roles. The Bill Wagner era has brought more public-company operational rigor — OKRs, clearer functional leadership, and a stronger focus on enterprise segment growth — while the founder-era DNA of deep technical ambition and product breadth remains intact. Candidates who combine technical depth with pragmatic delivery, and who can articulate how they make decisions with data, tend to do well.

What Semrush Looks For

  • Deep, specific domain fluency — in SEO/SEM, large-scale systems, data engineering, ML, or whichever discipline the role requires — rather than generalist resumes without a clear center of gravity.
  • Evidence of working with or against scale: large crawls, large indexes, large user bases, large ad budgets, or large content operations. Scale is a shared language across Semrush functions.
  • Dogfooding instinct — genuine curiosity about how Semrush's own tools work and how you would use them, not just awareness that they exist.
  • Strong written and spoken English, and the ability to collaborate asynchronously across timezones. Remote-native communication habits are a real hiring signal.
  • Public-company readiness for senior roles: comfort with metrics, forecasts, quarterly rhythms, and stakeholder communication at the VP and above level.
  • For engineers, a preference for pragmatic, production-grade choices — choosing boring, proven technology for core paths while still being able to reason about when a more exotic tool (ClickHouse, custom storage) is warranted.
  • For product and design, customer obsession grounded in real marketer/SEO workflows rather than abstract 'user empathy.'
  • For marketing and content roles, a portfolio of work that has driven organic traffic, pipeline, or brand authority that you can attribute with credible numbers.
  • Comfort with ambiguity and cross-functional ownership — Semrush teams are lean relative to the surface area of the product, so scope creep is common and managed well rather than resisted.
  • Alignment with the company's global, post-2022 identity: distributed, multicultural, English-first, and operator-led rather than tied to any single geography.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Semrush still a Russian company?
No. Semrush was founded in Russia in 2008 and historically had significant engineering operations in St. Petersburg, but following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine the company relocated its headquarters and the majority of its corporate operations. Today Semrush is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, is a US public company (NYSE: SEMR), and its engineering is distributed across Prague, Limassol, Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam, Krakow, Tbilisi, Yerevan, and remote roles. Many former St. Petersburg engineers were relocated into these EU and adjacent offices.
How does compensation compare between Boston, Prague, and remote roles?
Boston roles sit in a competitive tier-2 US tech band — mid-level software engineers typically land around $140K to $180K total compensation including RSUs. Prague mid-level software engineering is competitive for the Czech market at roughly €40K to €65K base, with RSUs on top. Other EU offices (Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam, Krakow) are benchmarked to their local markets. Fully remote roles are typically banded by the country of employment rather than by a single global rate, so compensation varies meaningfully by location even within the same job title.
What is the remote work policy?
Semrush operates as a globally distributed company with English as its corporate language. Many roles — particularly in engineering, data, product, and marketing — are fully remote within a specific region (EU, US, LATAM, or APAC). Some roles are hybrid to a specific office like Boston, Prague, or Limassol, and a smaller set are on-site. The job posting is explicit about the location and remote eligibility, so read it carefully and apply to the geography where you hold work authorization.
How is Semrush integrating AI and LLMs into the product and the workforce?
Semrush has been ramping AI and LLM investment meaningfully through 2024 and 2025, both in product features (content generation, content analysis, AI-assisted research, and interpretation of SEO data) and in internal tooling. For candidates, this shows up as more ML engineering, applied science, and AI product roles, as well as an expectation that product managers and engineers across the company can reason about where LLMs help and where they don't.
How does Semrush compare to Ahrefs and Moz as a place to work?
Semrush is the largest of the three by revenue and headcount and the only one that is publicly traded, which means it operates on a quarterly cadence with more formal operating rhythms. Ahrefs is private, based in Singapore, and known for a tighter, engineering-led culture with a narrower product scope. Moz, acquired by Ziff Davis in 2021, is now part of a larger digital media portfolio. Semrush typically offers broader product surface area to work on, a more global footprint, and the liquidity benefits of public-company equity, while smaller competitors may offer tighter scope and faster decision-making.
What does the engineering stack actually look like?
The backend is a mix of Go (dominant for newer services), Python (heavy in data, ML, and tooling), and Ruby on Rails (significant legacy surface area). Infrastructure runs on AWS with Kubernetes for orchestration. Data and streaming are built heavily on Kafka, ClickHouse (a major part of the stack for analytical workloads), PostgreSQL, and various object stores. The frontend uses modern JavaScript/TypeScript. The defining technical challenge is running one of the largest commercial web crawls and keyword indexes on the internet, which means distributed-systems and data-engineering depth is valued across the engineering org.
Does Semrush offer internships or early-career programs?
Semrush runs internship and junior-level programs periodically, particularly out of its Prague, Limassol, and Barcelona offices, and to a lesser degree Boston. These roles are posted on the standard careers portal rather than in a separate university-recruiting microsite, so check semrush.com/company/careers and filter by experience level. Availability varies year to year and by function.
Does Semrush sponsor work visas?
Sponsorship is uncommon. Semrush's strategy post-2022 has been to hire locally in each of its established hubs — Boston, Prague, Limassol, Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam, Krakow, Buenos Aires, Taipei — and to support relocations only in specific, usually senior or technically critical, cases. If you require sponsorship, state this explicitly in your application; for most roles you will be stronger as a candidate if you already hold work authorization for the posting's country.
What does career growth look like at Semrush?
As a roughly 1,200-person public company with a broad product surface area and an active M&A program, Semrush offers reasonable internal mobility — it is common for employees to move between product areas, from IC to lead/manager, or from a regional office into a global role. The Wagner era has brought more formal leveling, performance cycles, and functional career tracks than existed in the founder era, which benefits candidates who want clarity on progression.
How has the company changed under Bill Wagner versus the founder era?
Bill Wagner joined as CEO in July 2023 from LogMeIn (GoTo), where he had been CEO, and has brought a more operator- and public-company-oriented discipline: tighter functional leadership, more structured OKRs and planning cycles, clearer enterprise segmentation, and greater emphasis on margin and efficiency alongside growth. Co-founder Oleg Shchegolev remained involved in long-range technical and product strategy but stepped back from day-to-day CEO responsibilities. The founder-era DNA — technical ambition, product breadth, and dogfooding — is still present, but operational rigor has increased meaningfully.
What does 'we eat our own dogfood' mean in practice at Semrush?
It means Semrush's marketing, content, SEO, PPC, and customer success teams use Semrush products every day to run the company's own organic growth, competitive intelligence, and campaign measurement. Internal feedback from these teams flows directly into product roadmaps, and the company often uses its own domain as a case study in public content. For candidates, this shows up as a hiring preference — especially in GTM roles — for people who already use Semrush, Ahrefs, or comparable tools fluently and who can speak concretely about workflows rather than abstract capabilities.
Which acquisitions should I understand before interviewing?
The most relevant recent acquisitions are Backlinko (2022, SEO education property from Brian Dean), Kompyte (2022, competitive intelligence, now part of the enterprise toolkit), Traffic Think Tank (2023, SEO training community), and Third Door Media (2024, publisher of Search Engine Land, MarTech, and related industry events). These expanded Semrush's footprint into education, enterprise competitive intelligence, and owned editorial/events media. Understanding how each fits into the overall Semrush strategy is useful context for product, marketing, and strategy interviews.

Open Positions

Semrush currently has 5 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 5 open positions at Semrush

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Sources

  1. Semrush Holdings, Inc. — Company Overview —
  2. Semrush Careers —
  3. Semrush Holdings, Inc. — SEC Annual Report (Form 10-K) —
  4. Semrush Announces Bill Wagner as Chief Executive Officer (press release) —
  5. Semrush Holdings Prospectus / S-1 Filing (March 2021 IPO) —
  6. Semrush Acquires Third Door Media (Search Engine Land, MarTech) —
  7. Semrush Acquires Backlinko from Brian Dean —
  8. Semrush Acquires Kompyte to Expand Competitive Intelligence —
  9. Semrush Acquires Traffic Think Tank —
  10. Semrush on Leaving Russia and Relocating Operations (industry coverage, 2022) —
  11. Ahrefs vs Semrush vs Moz — Industry Comparison —
  12. Semrush on Glassdoor — Employee Reviews and Interview Insights —
  13. Semrush Company Page — LinkedIn —
  14. NYSE: SEMR — Semrush Holdings, Inc. Investor Relations —