Search Rust Engineer, Perplexity AI
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Open for applications
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Open for applications
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
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
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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