Member of Technical Staff (Search Core, Indexing & Data Pipeline Stream)

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

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking an Expert Systems Engineer to join our Search Core team in London. You will help architect and implement foundational components for next-generation search products, focusing on indexing pipelines and data processing at scale.

You will own end-to-end design, deployment, and optimization of systems in a high-performance stack, addressing multithreading, concurrency, and hardware-adjacent challenges.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in systems programming (Rust, C++, C, or similar).
• Ownership of full project lifecycle — you care about how the system is built, deployed, operated, and scaled in production.
• Knowledge of Python or other scripting languages.
• Knowledge of data processing systems (YT/Kafka/Hadoop).
• Passion for writing clean, efficient, and scalable systems-level code.
• Strong knowledge of algorithms and data structures.
• Deep understanding of multithreading and trade-offs.
• Experience building high-load, distributed and hardware-adjacent services.
• Solid understanding of Linux internals (syscalls, networking, memory, kernel tuning).
• Familiarity with low-level optimization techniques (memory management, cache, SIMD, profiling).

Responsibilities

• Design and build core search engine components, especially indexing pipelines for billon-page scale.
• Develop streaming and batch data processing for index construction in heavy-load environments.
• Push hardware performance through low-level optimizations and system tuning.
• Address multithreading, concurrency, and system-level optimization challenges.
• Design retrieval and ranking components for large-scale search systems.
• Develop data processing systems for search index construction in high-load settings.
• Push hardware performance through low-level optimization and tuning.
• Tackle concurrency and system-level optimization challenges.

Skills

Systems programming

Full project lifecycle

Python or scripting

Data processing systems

Clean, efficient code

Algorithms & data structures

Multithreading

Distributed systems

Linux internals

Low-level optimization

High-load systems

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Perplexity is looking for a highly skilled Expert Systems Engineer to join our Search Core team. For the indexing and data processing stream. This role is critical to building next-generation search products and technologies. You will help drive key decisions around the architecture, design, and implementation of foundational components in our technical stack.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core search engine components, especially indexing pipelines, data storage formats that operate at the scale of billions of pages

• Develop streaming and batch data processing with YT systems for search index construction in a high-load environment

• Push the limits of hardware performance through low-level optimizations and systems-level tuning

• Tackle challenges in multithreading, concurrency, and system-level optimization

• Design and build core search engine components, including indexing pipelines, retrieval algorithms, and ranking systems that operate at the scale of billions of pages

• Develop streaming and batch data processing systems for search index construction in a high-load environment

• Push the limits of hardware performance through low-level optimizations and systems-level tuning

• Tackle challenges in multithreading, concurrency, and system-level optimization

Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in systems programming (Rust, C++, C, or similar)

• Ownership of full project lifecycle — you don't just write a fast inner loop, you care about how the system is built, deployed, operated, and scaled in production

• Knowledge of Python or other scripting languages

• Knowledge of Data processing systems (YT/Kafka/Hadoop)

• Passion for writing clean, efficient, and scalable systems-level code

• Strong knowledge of algorithms and data structures, and the ability to apply them effectively

• Deep understanding of multithreading, including various approaches, challenges, and trade-offs

• Experience building high-load, distributed, and hardware-adjacent services

• Solid understanding of Linux internals (syscalls, networking stack, memory model, kernel tuning)

• Familiarity with low-level optimization techniques (memory management, cache efficiency, SIMD, profiling)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience developing core components of search engines, databases, or information retrieval systems

• Understanding of search fundamentals: indexing, query parsing, ranking, and relevance

• Experience with trading systems or other latency-sensitive real-time systems

• Familiarity with cloud services, Kubernetes, and AWS infrastructure