Search Rust Engineer, Perplexity AI

Member of Technical Staff

Salary not provided

AWS

Linux

Rust

Mid and Senior level

Berlin

London

3 days a week in office

Conversational AI-powered search tool

Open for applications

Conversational AI-powered search tool

1001+ employees

B2CArtificial IntelligenceDeep TechMachine Learning

Open for applications

Salary not provided

AWS

Linux

Rust

Mid and Senior level

Berlin

London

3 days a week in office

1001+ employees

B2CArtificial IntelligenceDeep TechMachine Learning

Company mission

To advance the way people discover and share information.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

Deep expertise in Rust programming, especially for backend/search systems
Experience profiling and tuning high-load, low-latency distributed services
Strong understanding of systems design, Linux internals, and performance debugging
Background in cloud infrastructure - preferably AWS - and container orchestration
Track record of driving efficiency for search or data-intensive products
Ability to thrive in fast-paced environments and own critical product code
Passion for benchmarking, instrumentation, and continuous performance improvement

What the job involves

Perplexity AI is seeking a talented Search Rust Engineer to join our rapidly growing team, driving innovation in AI-powered search experiences
As a Search Rust Engineer, your main mission will be to relentlessly optimize performance - squeezing every millisecond of latency from our search stack, while implementing robust, scalable, and reliable systems
Architect, build, and optimize ultra-low-latency search infrastructure using Rust
Profile and instrument services, continuously driving down response times at scale
Develop and maintain distributed backend components powering real-time search and retrieval
Collaborate closely with product and infrastructure teams to design systems that deliver best-in-class query performance
Apply advanced concurrency, memory management, and network programming patterns for maximum throughput
Monitor, debug, and tune production workloads to ensure reliability under demanding traffic
Contribute to code reviews and mentor peers in high-efficiency Rust development

Our take

As AI continues to drive changes in both business operations and day-to-day lives, Perplexity AI delivers an intelligent search engine powered by conversational AI, to improve search outcomes and "unlock the power of knowledge" for all.

Reaching impressive heights of 22M monthly visits, Perplexity's "ask anything" method of search is clearly a popular one. And what sets it apart from other search engines is in its answers, which are concise and fully cited, responding to the user query rather than simply providing a place in which they can scroll to find it themselves.

The company has raised substantial funding, with contributions from former execs at companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Quora, demonstrating the interest that it has drummed up in the space. Having doubled its annual recurring revenue between 2023 and 24, this investment will allow Perplexity AI to continue building out its product, and accelerate growth into the future.

Kirsty

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

Top investors

Trustpilot (1.5)

Company

Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)

Sep 2025

$200m

LATE VC

Jul 2025

$100m

LATE VC

Total funding: $1.7bn

Company HQ

Financial District, San Francisco, CA

Leadership

Aravind Srinivas

(Co-Founder, President & CEO)

Former Research Scientist at OpenAI, who has interned in Research at Google and Deep Mind. Obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Denis Yarats

(Co-Founder & CTO)

Prior to co-founding Perplexity in 2022, Denis was an AI Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research, a Staff ML Engineer at Quora, and a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft.

Johnny Ho

(Co-Founder & CSO)

Previously a Quantitative Trader at Tower Research Capital, and Engineer at Quora.

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