Member of Technical Staff (Search Engine Developer, Search Core)

The role

You will design and build core search engine components including indexing pipelines, retrieval algorithms, and ranking systems. You will develop data processing systems and perform low-level hardware optimizations.

What you will do

• Design and build core search engine components
• Develop streaming and batch data processing systems
• Push the limits of hardware performance through low-level optimizations
• Tackle challenges in multithreading, concurrency, and system-level optimization

Required qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in systems programming (Rust, C++, C, or similar)
• Ownership of full project lifecycle
• Knowledge of Python or other scripting languages
• Passion for writing clean, efficient, and scalable systems-level code
• Strong knowledge of algorithms and data structures
• Deep understanding of multithreading
• 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)

Nice to have

• Experience developing core components of search engines, databases, or information retrieval systems
• Understanding of search fundamentals: indexing, query parsing, ranking, and relevance
• Experience with trading systems or other latency-sensitive real-time systems
• Familiarity with cloud services, Kubernetes, and AWS infrastructure

About the company

Perplexity is looking for a highly skilled Senior or Expert Systems Engineer to join our Search Core team.