Staff Backend Engineer — Agentic AI Search

Nebius Group; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Career growth opportunities

Flexibility and ownership

Collaborative and innovative culture

Impactful AI projects

International environment and talented

Job summary

Nebius Group is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the runtime systems of a fast, scalable search platform tailored for AI workloads. You will design and operate core services that handle real-time queries with strict latency budgets, optimizing the critical path from request handling to data access and response assembly.

You will own high-load, low-latency backends, collaborating with indexing and ML teams to decouple ML logic from core systems, while ensuring reliability,

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 with thousands of RPS.
• System-level understanding of CPU, memory, networking, and data access.
• Experience deploying, debugging incidents, and rolling back changes in production.
• Ability to design end-to-end request flows and make pragmatic tradeoffs.
• Ability to collaborate across engineering, ML, and product teams.
• Open-source contributions or active involvement in the engineering community.
• Conference talks or technical publications.

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 as architecture evolves.
• Define observability primitives, including structured logs, metrics, traces, and latency breakdowns.
• Monitor throughput, latency, and resource usage; drive performance and cost improvements.
• Collaborate with indexing and ML teams to integrate retrieval and ranking components.
• Support experimentation and controlled rollouts and rigorous benchmarking.

Skills

C++ or Rust

Production backend systems

High-load systems

Performance optimization

System design

Observability

Debugging production incidents

Cross-functional collaboration

Open-source involvement

Technical publications or talks

Tools

Linux

Performance tooling

Job description

Nebius Group is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the runtime systems of a fast, scalable search platform tailored for AI workloads. You will design and operate core services that handle real-time queries with strict latency budgets, optimizing the critical path from request handling to data access and response assembly.

You will own high-load, low-latency backends, collaborating with indexing and ML teams to decouple ML logic from core systems, while ensuring reliability,