Staff Software Engineer — High-Performance AI Search Runtime

Nebius Group; Zürich; Hybrid; CHF 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Career growth

Flexibility and ownership

Collaborative and innovative culture

Impactful AI projects

International environment

Job summary

Nebius is building a fast-moving AI cloud platform for developers and enterprises. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design and run low-latency runtime services for our agent-native search engine, handling thousands of RPS with strict latency budgets.

You will optimize CPU, memory and data access, own critical paths, and collaborate with ML and indexing teams to push performance and cost efficiency while maintaining strong observability and reliability.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building production backend systems.
• Strong hands-on expertise in C++ or Rust for high‑load services.
• Experience with low‑latency systems handling thousands of RPS.
• Understanding of CPU, memory, networking, and data access.
• Production ownership: deployment, debugging, and rollbacks.
• End‑to‑end thinking across request flows.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate core runtime services for serving search queries at scale.
• Optimize request flows from query to response within strict latency budgets.
• Develop systems that maintain performance under high load.
• Optimize 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 contracts.
• Define observability primitives: logs, metrics, traces, latency breakdowns.
• Monitor throughput, latency, and resource usage; drive performance improvements.
• Collaborate with indexing and ML teams to integrate retrieval and ranking components.
• Support experimentation and controlled rollouts with rigorous benchmarking.

Skills

8+ years backend experience

C++ or Rust

High‑load systems

System performance

Production deployment

Cross‑functional collaboration

Job description

Nebius is building a fast-moving AI cloud platform for developers and enterprises. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design and run low-latency runtime services for our agent-native search engine, handling thousands of RPS with strict latency budgets.

You will optimize CPU, memory and data access, own critical paths, and collaborate with ML and indexing teams to push performance and cost efficiency while maintaining strong observability and reliability.