Senior Search Engine Developer, Perplexity AI

• 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)

Desirable

• 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
• 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