// the search engineering layer
Layer takes on your team's other jobs — caching, transforms, embedding, cost, and ops.
Free for 30 days. No credit card, no sales call.
# layer run
Ever needed to backfill your production data? With Layer that's as easy as building a docker container — Layer handles the compute and backfills as much of your index as you specify.
$ layer run -f udf.yaml --index products
✓ submitted product-tags
→ watching 142 rows · 0 failed · 8 rows/s
→ watching 1,284 rows · 0 failed · 11 rows/s
→ watching 4,510 rows · 0 failed · 13 rows/s
✓ complete · 12,840 rows · 23s · 0 failedYou build and push your container to the configured registry. Layer handles queueing and scaling semantics for you, while you track progress. No Kubernetes experience necessary.
# jobs to be done
Search teams need to solve many of the most complex and expensive jobs to be done in your org's data platform. Most of them have nothing to do with making search better for users.
// ship embeddings
Building CUDA images, writing Kubernetes autoscalers, managing Spark — the time sink every search team underestimates, and managed services trade one kind of pain for another. Layer collapses it: declare a Python UDF and layer runs the work on CPU or GPU, scaling pods and nodes between bursts.
Read the Docs// stay consistent
Keeping the index in sync with source data usually means hand-rolled watchers and event hooks glued together by the team that wrote them. Layer ships the operator: it scans the index for consistency, watermarks state changes, and rolls up facets your application can read directly.
Read the Docs// serve fetches
Whether it's a near-bottomless queue for building your pipeline, or serving full datasets from a pull-through cache, your search system needs O(1) read/write capabilities. Layer ships a production-hardened document cache tuned for high-throughput fetches.
Read the Docs// see search
Observability in 2026 has plenty of options and still demands plumbing. Layer bundles clickstream from the doc cache and operational metrics from the gateway into an opinionated dashboard, backed by a PromQL-compatible time series.
Read the Docs// scope access
Today every search team inside a multi-tenant product writes the auth proxy themselves: scope credentials to namespaces, gate the write paths, ship audit events somewhere security will accept. Layer ships scoped credentials, per-namespace RBAC, and an audit feed — the pattern your security team always asks for, as a primitive.
Read the Docs// track cost
Today "what does search cost us per million docs" is a question nobody can answer in under a week. AWS line items live in one bill, turbopuffer in another, GPU pool minutes nowhere obvious. Layer pulls every line item into one invoice and derives the unit metrics — cost per million docs, cost per TiB indexed, cost per query — that scrub with the timeframe.
Read the Docs# vector systems
Layer runs against turbopuffer today — one operator surface in front of the store your team already chose, wire-compatible with the client you already use.
# demos
Four real apps built on Layer, each making a gateway decision visible in the UI. Explore the demos.
# how to get started
Sign up with a work email and Layer sends a signed trial key. Install typically takes around 15 minutes with Terraform and Helm.
license.token or reference an existing Kubernetes Secret.# start a trial
Request your key and use it with a real turbopuffer-backed search workload. No credit card or sales call necessary.
// trial fit
The trial key and install instructions arrive by email.
# what's in the box
hev layer is a BYOC product installed with Terraform and Helm. Read the Docs.
See the docs for the full SBOM.