[Hiring] Member of Technical Staff @Perplexity

Role Description

Perplexity is looking for a highly skilled Expert Systems Engineer to join our Search Core team for the indexing and data processing stream. 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.

• Design and build core search engine components, especially indexing pipelines and data storage formats that operate at the scale of billions of pages.
• Develop streaming and batch data processing with YT 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.
• 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.
• Knowledge of Data processing systems (YT/Kafka/Hadoop).
• 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).

Requirements

• 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.