Staff Backend Engineer: Web-Scale Crawling for AI Search

Fdetimes; Zürich; Hybrid; CHF 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Career growth and learningOpportunites

Flexibility and ownership

Collaborative and innovative culture

Opportunity to work on impactful AI

International environment and talented

Job summary

Nebius, a leading AI cloud platform, seeks a Staff Software Engineer to advance its content acquisition and crawling infrastructure. You will design and operate systems that fetch and refresh content from the open web and major data sources, with a focus on scalability and reliability.

You will build distributed crawlers, scheduling and ingestion pipelines, and ensure high throughput with cost efficiency. Collaboration with indexing and ML teams will ensure data meets retrieval and ranking

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building backend or distributed systems.
• Strong Go or C++ expertise.
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems (10k+ RPS, billions of URLs).
• Understanding of web protocols (HTTP, DNS, TLS), crawling, scraping, and content extraction.
• Experience operating production systems and debugging failures in distributed environments.
• Strong understanding of scalability, fault tolerance, and resource management.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate web-scale crawling systems for acquiring content from the internet
• Build ingestion workflows for internal and external data sources, including crawlers, structured feeds, and partner integrations
• Develop crawl scheduling, prioritisation, recrawl policies, and freshness strategies
• Build systems for URL discovery, deduplication, content extraction, and crawl orchestration
• Ensure reliable operation of crawling infrastructure under high-throughput conditions
• Define observability and quality metrics for crawl coverage, freshness, throughput, and content quality
• Monitor resource usage, bandwidth consumption, and infrastructure cost
• Collaborate with indexing and ML teams to ensure acquired content meets retrieval and ranking requirements
• Enable safe experimentation with crawling strategies and content acquisition policies

Skills

Go/C++

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Web protocols (HTTP/DNS/TLS)

Production debugging

Resource management

Tools

Kafka

Pulsar

NATS

RabbitMQ

Job description

Nebius, a leading AI cloud platform, seeks a Staff Software Engineer to advance its content acquisition and crawling infrastructure. You will design and operate systems that fetch and refresh content from the open web and major data sources, with a focus on scalability and reliability.

You will build distributed crawlers, scheduling and ingestion pipelines, and ensure high throughput with cost efficiency. Collaboration with indexing and ML teams will ensure data meets retrieval and ranking