Member of Technical Staff – Search Engine Developer (Search Core)

About the role

Perplexity is looking for a highly skilled Senior or Expert Systems Engineer to join the Search Core team. This role is critical to building next‑generation search products and technologies, driving key decisions around architecture, design, and implementation of foundational components.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build core search engine components, including indexing pipelines, retrieval algorithms, and ranking systems that operate 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.
• Own the full project lifecycle from implementation to production deployment and scaling.

Required profile

• 3+ years of hands‑on systems programming experience (Rust, C++, C, or similar).
• Ownership of the full project lifecycle, caring about deployment, operation, and scaling.
• Strong knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and their effective application.
• Deep understanding of multithreading, concurrency models, and trade‑offs.
• Experience building high‑load, distributed, hardware‑adjacent services.
• Solid understanding of Linux internals (syscalls, networking stack, memory model, kernel tuning).
• Familiarity with low‑level optimization techniques such as memory management, cache efficiency, SIMD, and profiling.

Required skills

• Rust, C++, C
• Python
• Linux system programming
• SIMD and low‑level performance tuning
• Profiling tools
• Kubernetes
• AWS cloud services