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

The role

This role sits on the Search Core team, which develops the foundational pieces of Perplexity's search stack. The engineer would help shape architecture and implementation decisions for components that handle indexing, retrieval, and ranking across very large page collections.

What you would do

• Build core search components such as index pipelines, retrieval methods, and ranking logic sized for billions of documents
• Create streaming and batch processing systems that construct the search index under heavy load
• Extract more performance from hardware through low-level and systems-level tuning
• Work through concurrency and multithreading problems across the system

What they asked for

• Three or more years of hands-on systems programming in languages like Rust, C++, or C
• Take ownership of a project end to end, including build, deployment, operations, and scaling
• Working knowledge of Python or another scripting language
• Strong grounding in algorithms and data structures
• Deep understanding of multithreading approaches and their trade-offs
• Experience with high-load, distributed, or hardware-adjacent services
• Solid command of Linux internals such as syscalls, networking, memory model, and kernel tuning
• Familiarity with low-level optimization such as memory management, cache behavior, SIMD, and profiling

Nice to have

• Prior work on core parts of search engines, databases, or retrieval systems
• Grasp of search fundamentals like indexing, query parsing, and relevance
• Background in trading or other latency-sensitive real-time systems
• Exposure to cloud platforms, Kubernetes, and AWS