Staff Systems Engineer - Search Core & Data Pipelines

Perplexity; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking an Expert Systems Engineer to join the Search Core team, focusing on indexing pipelines and data processing for billions of pages. You will push hardware performance with low-level optimizations and tackle multithreading challenges in a high-load environment.

You will design core components of the search engine, including retrieval and ranking systems, while ensuring scalable, production-ready solutions with strong emphasis on efficiency and reliability.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on systems programming (Rust, C++, or similar).
• Owns full lifecycle of a project, from design to production deployment.
• Proficient with Python or other scripting languages.
• Experience with data processing systems (YT, Kafka, Hadoop).
• Strong knowledge of algorithms and data structures; multithreading expertise.
• Linux internals and low-level optimization knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core search engine components, especially indexing pipelines and storage formats for billions of pages.
• Develop streaming and batch data processing for search index construction in a high-load environment.
• Push hardware performance through low-level optimizations and systems-level tuning.
• Tackle challenges in multithreading, concurrency, and system-level optimization.
• Design and build core retrieval and ranking components operating at scale.

Skills

Systems programming

Full lifecycle ownership

Python scripting

Data processing

Clean code

Algorithms & DS

Multithreading

High-load distributed systems

Linux internals

Low-level optimization

Job description

Perplexity is seeking an Expert Systems Engineer to join the Search Core team, focusing on indexing pipelines and data processing for billions of pages. You will push hardware performance with low-level optimizations and tackle multithreading challenges in a high-load environment.

You will design core components of the search engine, including retrieval and ranking systems, while ensuring scalable, production-ready solutions with strong emphasis on efficiency and reliability.