Member of Technical Staff (Search Engine Developer, Search Core)
Perplexity·London, England, United Kingdom | Belgrade, Serbia | Berlin, Berlin, Germany·posted 502d ago · last seen 4m agoTrack this application
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Get Started FreeAbout interviewing at Perplexity
One of the few AI startups with a fully published interview guide (perplexity.ai/hub/careers/interview-guide): online application (response within two weeks) → recruiter phone screen → a technical screen that for engineers is 'usually a standard technical programming interview' → a quickly-scheduled onsite of 4–5 interviews including a hiring-manager deep dive on past work and experience anecdotes → a final interview with a Perplexity founder or leader → decision within a week of the onsite. Coding leans Python and mixes LeetCode medium–hard with practical search-flavored tasks (ranking/filtering, concurrency, data handling); system design is AI-native (RAG pipelines, retrieval at scale, LLM serving cost/latency). Applicants are judged 'solely on merit and potential impact' and must show 'frontier knowledge and excellence in at least one area'; roles are broad by default with team matching happening during the onsite, every role — managers included — is hands-on, and building AI products isn't expected but fluency in using AI tools is required. In-person 4 days/week near an office; remote is case-by-case.
Read the full Perplexity interview process →Description
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.
Responsibilities
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
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)
Preferred Qualifications
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
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