Principal Rust Engineer — Lead Distributed AI Search Engine

Progress; España; Remote; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous remuneration package

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Job summary

Progress is seeking a Principal Rust Engineer to lead the architecture of a distributed search and indexing engine for its Agentic RAG product. You will design vector, full-text and graph indexes, shaping performance and stability across Kubernetes deployments and cloud storage backends.

You will mentor teammates, contribute PyO3 bindings, and coordinate large migrations while delivering incremental technical direction in a remote-first, international team.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience building and running high-performance production systems.
• Expert Rust: async (Tokio), concurrency, memory-mapped I/O, profiling and low-level optimization.
• Deep knowledge of search engine internals: ANN search, vector quantization, inverted indexes and ranking.
• Experience designing distributed data systems: storage engines, sharding, replication and consistency.
• Solid experience with PostgreSQL, object storage (S3, GCS, Azure) and messaging (NATS JetStream or Kafka).
• Strong Python, ideally with PyO3, asyncio, FastAPI and Pydantic.
• Experience running services on Kubernetes with observability and CI/CD.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and roadmap of our distributed search and indexing engine, written in Rust.
• Design and implement vector, full-text and graph indexes and the query layer on top of them.
• Evolve how indexes are built, merged, sharded and replicated on object storage, PostgreSQL and NATS.
• Lead large migrations and performance work with no customer downtime.
• Contribute to Python services, SDKs and PyO3 bindings while keeping public APIs stable.
• Keep the system observable, reliable and secure across Kubernetes deployments and CI/CD.
• Write design proposals, review code, mentor senior engineers and represent the project in the open-source community.

Skills

Rust expert

Search engines

Distributed systems

PostgreSQL & cloud storage

Python (PyO3)

Kubernetes & CI/CD

English communication

Mentoring

Tools

Tantivy

Lucene

Vector databases

NATS/Kafka

PyO3 bindings

Job description

Progress is seeking a Principal Rust Engineer to lead the architecture of a distributed search and indexing engine for its Agentic RAG product. You will design vector, full-text and graph indexes, shaping performance and stability across Kubernetes deployments and cloud storage backends.

You will mentor teammates, contribute PyO3 bindings, and coordinate large migrations while delivering incremental technical direction in a remote-first, international team.