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 its Search Core team. This role is critical to building next‑generation search products and technologies.

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.

Required profile

• 3+ years of hands‑on experience in systems programming (Rust, C++, C, or similar).
• Ownership of the full project lifecycle, from fast inner loops to deployment, operation, and scaling in production.
• Knowledge of Python or other scripting languages.
• Passion for writing clean, efficient, and scalable systems‑level code.
• Strong knowledge of algorithms and data structures with effective application.
• Deep understanding of multithreading, including various 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).
• Familiarity with low‑level optimization techniques such as memory management, cache efficiency, SIMD, and profiling.

Required skills

• Rust
• C++
• C
• Python
• Linux
• SIMD
• Profiling