Staff Software Engineer: Real-Time Agentic Search Backend

Nebius Group; Amsterdam; Remote; EUR 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Career growth and learning

Flexibility and ownership

Collaborative and innovative culture

Opportunity to work on impactful AI"

Job summary

Nebius, Amsterdam-based AI cloud platform, seeks a Staff Software Engineer to design and optimize the runtime systems of a low-latency, agent-focused search engine. You will own core services that serve thousands of requests per second, optimize CPU/memory usage, and ensure observability, reliability and predictability in production.

Collaboration with indexing and ML teams, rigorous benchmarking, and scalable, well-tested code are essential; this role offers ownership, international teams, and

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience as a software engineer on production backend systems.
• Strong hands-on expertise in C++ or Rust in real‑world, high‑load services.
• Built and operated high‑load, low‑latency user‑facing systems handling thousands of RPS under strict latency constraints.
• Understand performance at a systems level — CPU, memory, networking, and data access.
• Have operated your own code in production: deployed it, debugged incidents, and rolled back changes when necessary.
• Think end‑to‑end about request flows rather than staying within isolated components.
• Can balance correctness, latency, and development velocity, making pragmatic tradeoffs when scope or time requires.
• Collaborate effectively across engineering, ML, and product teams, communicating clearly in cross‑functional settings

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate core runtime services for serving search queries at scale.
• Build and optimise request flows, including query processing, retrieval orchestration, 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 and implement observability primitives, including structured 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, keeping ML logic decoupled from core system internals.
• Support experimentation and iteration through controlled rollouts and rigorous benchmarking

Skills

C++

Rust

High‑load systems

Performance tuning

Job description

Nebius, Amsterdam-based AI cloud platform, seeks a Staff Software Engineer to design and optimize the runtime systems of a low-latency, agent-focused search engine. You will own core services that serve thousands of requests per second, optimize CPU/memory usage, and ensure observability, reliability and predictability in production.

Collaboration with indexing and ML teams, rigorous benchmarking, and scalable, well-tested code are essential; this role offers ownership, international teams, and