Staff Software Engineer (Agentic Search) - Crawler

Fdetimes; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Career growth and learning

Flexibility and ownership

Collaborative culture

Impactful AI projects

International environment

Job summary

Nebius in London is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to build the content acquisition and crawling infrastructure for a world-scale search platform designed for agentic AI. You will design distributed crawling, scheduling, and ingestion systems capable of handling billions of URLs and terabytes of data.

Collaborate with indexing and ML teams, improve observability, optimize resource use, and drive safe experimentation with crawling strategies.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building backend or distributed systems.
• Strong Go or C++ expertise.
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems (10k+ RPS, billions of URLs, high-throughput pipelines).
• Understanding of web protocols (HTTP, DNS, TLS), crawling, scraping, and content extraction.
• Experience operating production systems and debugging failures in distributed environments.
• Strong understanding of scalability, fault tolerance, and resource management.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate web-scale crawling systems for acquiring content from the internet.
• Build ingestion workflows for internal and external data sources, including crawlers, structured feeds, and partner integrations.
• Develop crawl scheduling, prioritisation, recrawl policies, and freshness strategies.
• Build systems for URL discovery, deduplication, content extraction, and crawl orchestration.
• Ensure reliable operation of crawling infrastructure under high-throughput conditions.
• Define observability and quality metrics for crawl coverage, freshness, throughput, and content quality.
• Monitor resource usage, bandwidth consumption, and infrastructure cost.
• Collaborate with indexing and ML teams to ensure acquired content meets retrieval and ranking requirements.
• Enable safe experimentation with crawling strategies and content acquisition policies.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go/C++ expertise

High throughput

Web protocols

Production debugging

Tools

Kafka

Pulsar

NATS

RabbitMQ

Spark

Flink

Job description

About Nebius

Nebius is leading a new era in cloud infrastructure for the global AI economy. We are building a full-stack AI cloud platform that supports developers and enterprises from data and model training through to production deployment, without the cost and complexity of building large in-house AI/ML infrastructure.

Built by engineers, for engineers. From large-scale GPU orchestration to inference optimization, we own the hard problems across compute, storage, networking and applied AI.

Listed on Nasdaq (NBIS) and headquartered in Amsterdam, we have a global footprint with R&D hubs across Europe, the UK, North America and Israel. Our team of 1,500+ includes hundreds of engineers with deep expertise across hardware, software and AI R&D.

The Product

In a rapidly evolving world, trust in AI depends on AI agents being grounded in fresh, verified real-world data. Search is the foundation that makes this possible.

We are building an agent-native search platform designed specifically for AI systems rather than human users. Our product provides programmatic, low-latency, and observable search APIs that AI agents use to retrieve, filter, and reason over real-world information at scale.

The Role

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to work on the content acquisition and crawling infrastructure of a novel search engine tailored for agentic AI consumption.

In this role, you will focus on building systems that discover, fetch, and continuously refresh content from the open web and other large-scale data sources. You will design distributed crawling, scheduling, and ingestion infrastructure capable of operating at internet scale while balancing coverage, freshness, resource efficiency, and reliability. You will work on systems that process billions of URLs, manage high-throughput data flows, and ensure that high-quality content is consistently available to downstream indexing and retrieval systems.

In this position, your responsibility will be to

• Design, implement, and operate web-scale crawling systems for acquiring content from the internet
• Build ingestion workflows for internal and external data sources, including crawlers, structured feeds, and partner integrations
• Develop crawl scheduling, prioritisation, recrawl policies, and freshness strategies
• Build systems for URL discovery, deduplication, content extraction, and crawl orchestration
• Ensure reliable operation of crawling infrastructure under high-throughput conditions
• Define observability and quality metrics for crawl coverage, freshness, throughput, and content quality
• Monitor resource usage, bandwidth consumption, and infrastructure cost
• Collaborate with indexing and ML teams to ensure acquired content meets retrieval and ranking requirements
• Enable safe experimentation with crawling strategies and content acquisition policies

You may be a good fit if you

• 8+ years of experience building backend or distributed systems
• Strong Go or C++ expertise
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems (10k+ RPS, billions of URLs, high-throughput pipelines)
• Understanding of web protocols (HTTP, DNS, TLS), crawling, scraping, and content extraction
• Experience operating production systems and debugging failures in distributed environments
• Strong understanding of scalability, fault tolerance, and resource management

Strong candidates may also have experience with

• Web crawling
• Building streaming data pipelines and event-driven systems
• Kafka, Pulsar, NATS, RabbitMQ, or similar messaging platforms
• Designing distributed schedulers, queues, and asynchronous processing systems
• Spark, Flink, Beam, or MapReduce
• Ad tech, social networks, search engines, or other large-scale content platforms

We conduct coding interviews as part of the process.

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive compensation
• Career growth and learning opportunities
• Flexibility and ownership
• Collaborative and innovative culture
• Opportunity to work on impactful AI projects
• International environment and talented teams

What's it like to work at Nebius

Fast moving - Bold thinking - Constant growth - Meaningful impact - Trust and real ownership - Opportunity to shape the future of AI

Equal Opportunity Statement

Nebius is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace and to providing equal employment opportunities in all aspects of employment. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, ancestry, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Applicants must be authorized to work in the country in which they apply and will be required to provide proof of employment eligibility as a condition of hire.

If you need accommodations during the application process, please let us know.