Senior Search Core Engineer - Indexing & Data Pipelines

Perplexity; Belgrade (MT); On-site; USD 135,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking an Expert Systems Engineer to join the Search Core team. You will design and implement core search engine components, focusing on indexing pipelines and retrieval/ranking at scale across billions of pages.

The role emphasizes hands-on systems programming and production-grade deployment, with a strong emphasis on performance. You will contribute to streaming and batch data processing for index construction in a high-load environment, optimize hardware performance with

Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in systems programming (Rust, C++, C, or similar).
• Ownership of full project lifecycle — you don't just write a fast inner loop, 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, and the ability to apply them effectively.
• Deep understanding of multithreading, including various approaches, challenges, and trade-offs.
• Experience building high-load, distributed, and hardware-adjacent services.
• Solid understanding of Linux internals (syscalls, networking stack, memory model, kernel tuning).
• Familiarity with low-level optimization techniques (memory management, cache efficiency, SIMD, profiling).

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Systems programming

Multithreading

Optimization

Linux internals

Data processing

Python scripting

Distributed systems

Tools

Rust

C++

C

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Perplexity is seeking an Expert Systems Engineer to join the Search Core team. You will design and implement core search engine components, focusing on indexing pipelines and retrieval/ranking at scale across billions of pages.

The role emphasizes hands-on systems programming and production-grade deployment, with a strong emphasis on performance. You will contribute to streaming and batch data processing for index construction in a high-load environment, optimize hardware performance with