Member of Technical Staff (Search Engine Developer, Search Core) — Perplexity AI

Perplexity is looking for a highly skilled Senior or Expert Systems Engineer to join our Search Core team. This role is critical to building next-generation search products and technologies. You will help drive key decisions around the architecture, design, and implementation of foundational components in our technical stack.

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

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

• 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)

Preferred Qualifications

• 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