Senior Backend Engineer: Low-Latency, High-Throughput Systems

Nebius; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Career growth

Flexible work

Collaborative culture

Impactful AI projects

International teams

Job summary

Nebius is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to work on the runtime systems of a novel search engine tailored for agentic AI consumption. You will focus on building low‑latency, high‑throughput systems that serve search queries in real time.

You will work on the critical path of user‑facing requests, where performance, predictability, and efficiency directly impact product quality. You will design and operate systems that handle thousands of requests per second under strict latency budgets,

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building production backend systems.
• Strong hands-on expertise in C++ or Rust in real-world, high-load services.
• Experience delivering low-latency, high-throughput systems that serve thousands of requests per second.
• Understanding of CPU, memory, networking and data access at system level.
• Proven ability to deploy, debug incidents and rollback changes in production.
• End-to-end thinking on request flows and tradeoffs between correctness and latency.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate core runtime services for serving search queries at scale.
• Build and optimise request flows, including query processing and response assembly under latency budgets.
• Develop systems that maintain performance under high load.
• Optimise data access and memory usage in performance-critical paths.
• Ensure reliability, observability, and contracts across production services.
• Build well-tested components with clear ownership as architecture evolves.
• Define observability primitives: logs, metrics, traces, latency breakdowns.
• Monitor throughput, latency, and resource usage to drive improvements.
• Collaborate with indexing and ML teams to integrate retrieval and ranking components.
• Support experimentation and controlled rollouts and benchmarking.

Skills

Backend development

C++/Rust

Low-latency

Performance tuning

Distributed systems

Incident handling

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Nebius is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to work on the runtime systems of a novel search engine tailored for agentic AI consumption. You will focus on building low‑latency, high‑throughput systems that serve search queries in real time.

You will work on the critical path of user‑facing requests, where performance, predictability, and efficiency directly impact product quality. You will design and operate systems that handle thousands of requests per second under strict latency budgets,