Expert Systems Engineer (Search)

Location: Belgrade, Berlin, London, or remote

Company

Perplexity develops search products and technologies, with this role supporting the Search Core indexing and data processing stream.

What you will do

• Design and build core search engine components, including indexing pipelines, retrieval algorithms, ranking systems, and large-scale data storage formats.
• Develop streaming and batch data processing systems for search index construction in a high-load environment.
• Build systems that operate at the scale of billions of pages.
• Optimize hardware performance through low-level systems tuning, memory management, cache efficiency, SIMD, and profiling.
• Solve complex multithreading, concurrency, and system-level optimization challenges.
• Own the full project lifecycle, including deployment, production operations, scaling, and collaboration on architecture decisions.

Requirements

• 3+ years of hands-on systems programming experience with Rust, C++, C, or similar languages.
• Knowledge of Python or other scripting languages.
• Knowledge of data processing systems such as YT, Kafka, or Hadoop.
• Strong knowledge of algorithms, data structures, multithreading, and concurrency trade-offs.
• Experience building high-load, distributed, and hardware-adjacent services.
• Solid understanding of Linux internals, including syscalls, networking, memory models, and kernel tuning.

Nice to have

• Experience developing search engines, databases, or information retrieval systems.
• Understanding of 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.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time position within the Search department.
• Work from Belgrade, Berlin, London, or remotely.
• Focus on clean, efficient, scalable, and production-ready systems-level code.