Staff Systems Engineer, Search Core & Indexing

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 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.