Member of Technical Staff - Search Core, Indexing & Data Pipeline

About the role

Perplexity is looking for a highly skilled Expert Systems Engineer to join its Search Core team, on the indexing and data processing stream. The role is central to building next-generation search products and technologies, working on systems that handle billions of pages.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build core search engine components, including indexing pipelines, data storage formats, retrieval algorithms and ranking systems operating at the scale of billions of pages.
• Develop streaming and batch data processing systems for search index construction in a high-load environment.
• Push the limits of hardware performance through low-level optimizations and systems-level tuning.
• Tackle challenges in multithreading, concurrency and system-level optimization.

Required profile

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in systems programming (Rust, C++, C or similar).
• Ownership of the full project lifecycle, from implementation to deployment, operation and scaling in production.
• Strong knowledge of algorithms and data structures, and deep understanding of multithreading, including its approaches, challenges and trade-offs.
• Experience building high-load, distributed and hardware-adjacent services.
• Solid understanding of Linux internals (syscalls, networking stack, memory model, kernel tuning).

Required skills

• Systems programming in Rust, C++ or C; knowledge of Python or other scripting languages.
• Data processing systems such as YT, Kafka and Hadoop.
• Nice to have: experience with search engines, databases or information retrieval systems; search fundamentals (indexing, query parsing, ranking, relevance); trading systems or other latency-sensitive real-time systems; cloud services, Kubernetes and AWS.