Staff Backend Engineer: Real-Time, Low-Latency Systems

Nebius Group; City of Amsterdam (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; 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

International environment

Job summary

Nebius is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to work on the runtime systems of a novel search engine tailored for agentic AI consumption. You will design and operate low-latency, high-throughput services that handle thousands of requests per second, optimizing every layer from request handling to data access.

In this role you will ensure reliability, observability, and performance under high load, collaborate with indexing and ML teams to integrate retrieval and ranking components, and drive

Qualifications

• 8+ years of production backend software experience.
• Proficiency in C++ or Rust for high-load services.
• Experience building low-latency, scalable systems handling thousands of RPS.
• System-level understanding of CPU, memory, networking, data access.
• Experience operating code in production, debugging incidents.
• End-to-end mindset on request flows.
• Ability to balance correctness, latency, and velocity.
• Strong collaboration across engineering, ML and product teams.

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.
• 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, while remaining flexible as architecture evolves.
• 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

Backend systems

Low-latency

Performance optimization

Observability

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Nebius is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to work on the runtime systems of a novel search engine tailored for agentic AI consumption. You will design and operate low-latency, high-throughput services that handle thousands of requests per second, optimizing every layer from request handling to data access.

In this role you will ensure reliability, observability, and performance under high load, collaborate with indexing and ML teams to integrate retrieval and ranking components, and drive