Senior Backend Engineer — Low-Latency AI Search

Nebius Group; Zurich (KS); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Career growth and learning

Flexibility and ownership

Collaborative and innovative culture

Impactful AI projects

International environment

Job summary

Nebius is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to work on the runtime systems of a novel search engine designed for agentic AI consumption. You will focus on building low-latency, high-throughput systems that handle real-time queries and optimize critical paths from request handling to data access.

Join a team of engineers to design reliable services, improve observability, and collaborate with ML/ indexing groups to integrate retrieval and ranking components at scale.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building production backend services.
• Proficient in C++ or Rust for high-throughput systems.
• Experience with real-time, low-latency architectures.

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

Skills

C++

Rust

Job description

Nebius is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to work on the runtime systems of a novel search engine designed for agentic AI consumption. You will focus on building low-latency, high-throughput systems that handle real-time queries and optimize critical paths from request handling to data access.

Join a team of engineers to design reliable services, improve observability, and collaborate with ML/ indexing groups to integrate retrieval and ranking components at scale.