Can you use SQL-style wildcards in Algolia?

No.

By design, Algolia is a prefix search based engine and doesn’t support infix/suffix matching; therefore it won’t find substrings in the middle or the end of a string if you were wanting to use the wildcard symbol from SQL.

 
We can recommend a workaround described here:   https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/managing-results/optimize-search-results/override-search-engine-defaults/how-to/how-can-i-make-queries-within-the-middle-of-a-word/