Staff Backend Engineer, Real-Time AI Search Systems

Nebius Group; Zürich; On-site; CHF 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Career growth and learning

Flexibility and ownership

Collaborative and innovative culture

International environment

Job summary

Nebius Group is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to work on the runtime systems of a novel search engine tailored for agentic AI consumption. You will design and operate low-latency, high-throughput services handling thousands of requests per second with strict latency budgets.

You will collaborate with indexing and ML teams to integrate retrieval and ranking components while improving performance, observability, and cost efficiency across production services.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience as a software engineer working on production backend systems.
• Strong hands-on expertise in C++ or Rust in real-world, high-load services.
• Built and operated high-load, low-latency user-facing systems handling thousands of RPS under strict latency constraints.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate core runtime services for serving search queries at scale.
• Build and optimise request flows, including query processing, retrieval orchestration, and response assembly under strict latency budgets.
• Develop systems that maintain performance and predictability under high load.
• Optimise CPU, memory, and data access patterns in performance-critical paths.
• Ensure reliability, observability, and predictability across production services.
• Build well-tested systems with clear responsibilities and interaction contracts, while remaining flexible as architecture evolves.
• Define and implement observability primitives, including structured logs, metrics, traces, and latency breakdowns.
• Monitor throughput, latency, and resource usage, and drive improvements in performance and cost efficiency.
• Collaborate with indexing and ML teams to integrate retrieval and ranking components, keeping ML logic decoupled from core system internals.
• Support experimentation and iteration through controlled rollouts and rigorous benchmarking.

Job description

Nebius Group is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to work on the runtime systems of a novel search engine tailored for agentic AI consumption. You will design and operate low-latency, high-throughput services handling thousands of requests per second with strict latency budgets.

You will collaborate with indexing and ML teams to integrate retrieval and ranking components while improving performance, observability, and cost efficiency across production services.