Staff Backend Engineer — Low-Latency AI Search at Scale

Arbeitnow; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 110,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Career growth and learning

Flexibility and ownership

Collaborative and innovative culture

Job summary

Nebius is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join our runtime systems team, focused on a novel search engine designed for agented AI consumption. You will shape low-latency, high-throughput services that handle real-time queries and optimise across the full stack from request handling to data access.

You will work on critical-path components, ensuring performance, predictability and cost efficiency, while collaborating with indexing and ML teams to keep ML logic decoupled from core systems.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience as a software engineer working on production backend systems.
• Strong hands-on expertise in C++ or Rust in real-world, high-load services.
• Experience building high-load, low-latency user-facing systems handling thousands of RPS under latency constraints.
• Understanding of performance at a systems level including CPU, memory, networking, and data access.

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 strict latency budgets.
• Develop systems that maintain performance and predictability under high load.
• Optimise CPU, memory, and data access patterns in performance-critical paths.
• Ensure reliability, observability, and predictability across production services.
• Build well-tested systems with clear responsibilities and interaction contracts.
• Define observability primitives with logs, metrics, traces, and latency breakdowns.
• Monitor throughput, latency, and resource usage and drive improvements in performance and cost efficiency.
• Collaborate with indexing and ML teams to integrate retrieval and ranking components.

Skills

C++

Rust

Tools

DBMS internals

Cloud infrastructure

Job description

Nebius is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join our runtime systems team, focused on a novel search engine designed for agented AI consumption. You will shape low-latency, high-throughput services that handle real-time queries and optimise across the full stack from request handling to data access.

You will work on critical-path components, ensuring performance, predictability and cost efficiency, while collaborating with indexing and ML teams to keep ML logic decoupled from core systems.