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Perplexity AI is seeking a highly skilled systems engineer to join the Search Core team, specifically focusing on the indexing and data pipeline stream. This is a critical role in building next-generation search products and technologies. You will drive key architectural and design decisions for foundational components in the technical stack.
Responsibilities:
- Design and build core search engine components, particularly indexing pipelines and data storage formats that operate at the scale of billions of pages
- Develop streaming and batch data processing systems for search index construction in high-load environments
- Push the limits of hardware performance through low-level optimizations and systems-level tuning
- Tackle challenges in multithreading, concurrency, and system-level optimization
- Design and implement retrieval algorithms and ranking systems operating at massive scale
- Own the full project lifecycle from architecture through production deployment, operation, and scaling
Requirements:
- 3+ years of hands-on experience in systems programming (Rust, C++, C, or similar languages)
- Demonstrated ownership of full project lifecycle—not just writing fast code, but understanding how systems are built, deployed, operated, and scaled in production
- Knowledge of Python or other scripting languages
- Experience with data processing systems (YT/Kafka/Hadoop)
- Passion for writing clean, efficient, and scalable systems-level code
- Strong knowledge of algorithms and data structures with 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
About Perplexity AI
AI / Data / Infrastructure — AI answer engine and search product for consumers and enterprises.
