Member of Technical Staff (Backend Software Engineer, Search Crawler)

Perplexity; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking an experienced Backend Software Engineer to join our Crawler team. You will design, develop, and operate systems that ingest, process, and manage web-scale data for our next generation of advanced search technologies.

You will own projects focused on building large-scale web crawlers, ingestion pipelines, and data processing systems, while improving backend and frontend components for crawler services, dashboards, and data management.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software development experience.
• Experience with large-scale web crawlers is highly desirable.
• Experience with high-load, distributed services and cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of and lead projects developing large-scale web crawlers, ingestion pipelines, and data processing systems.
• Build, maintain, and optimize core backend and frontend components for crawler services, including storage, retrieval, and UI dashboards for data management.
• Collaborate with Search and Infrastructure teams to ensure reliable ingestion and processing of billions of web pages.
• Architect and implement fullstack features and scalable distributed systems for high-load, real-time data operations.
• Iterate rapidly, experiment with new approaches, and continuously enhance system performance and reliability.

Skills

Python

C++

Rust

Go

Data structures & algorithms

Distributed systems

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

We are seeking an experienced Backend Software Engineer to join our Crawler team. In this role, you will design, develop, and operate systems that ingest, process, and manage web-scale data in support of our next generation of advanced search technologies. This is a critical, high-impact engineering position, requiring expertise across both backend and frontend components of our data acquisition stack.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of and lead projects focused on developing large-scale web crawlers, ingestion pipelines, and data processing systems.
• Build, maintain, and optimize core backend and frontend components for crawler services, including storage, retrieval, and UI dashboards for data management.
• Collaborate closely with Search and Infrastructure teams to ensure the reliable, high-quality ingestion and processing of billions of web pages.
• Architect and implement fullstack features and scalable distributed systems that handle high-load and real-time data operations.
• Rapidly iterate, experiment with novel approaches, and continuously enhance system performance, usability, and reliability.
• Demonstrated passion for writing clean, efficient, and scalable systems.
  

Qualifications

• Minimum of 5 years of software development experience, with strong knowledge of data structures and algorithms in at least one of the following languages: Python, C++, Rust, or Go.
• Experience with large-scale web crawlers is highly desirable.
• Proven experience building, deploying, and optimizing high-load, distributed, and hardware-adjacent services.
• Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, with hands-on experience in Kubernetes (K8s) and AWS.
• Demonstrated passion for writing clean, efficient, and scalable systems.