Member of Technical Staff (Search Core, Indexing & Data Pipeline Stream)

Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine company building next-generation discovery products. The Search Core team is hiring a Member of Technical Staff to own the indexing and data pipeline infrastructure that powers search at massive scale. In this role, you will architect and implement foundational systems components that handle billions of pages, working on problems where performance, reliability, and scalability directly impact millions of users.

About Perplexity

Perplexity has emerged as a leading player in AI-driven search, competing directly with traditional search engines by leveraging advanced language models and real-time information retrieval. The company focuses on providing users with direct answers backed by cited sources, distinguishing itself through accuracy and transparency. As AI search adoption accelerates across the market, Perplexity is expanding its technical infrastructure to support growing query volumes and increasingly sophisticated retrieval demands.

What you'll do

• Design and build core indexing pipelines and data storage formats that process and serve billions of pages in production
• Develop streaming and batch data processing systems using technologies like YT for constructing search indexes under sustained high load
• Optimize performance at the hardware level through low-level tuning, memory management, cache efficiency, and SIMD techniques
• Solve complex concurrency and multithreading challenges while maintaining system correctness and throughput
• Own the full lifecycle of systems from architecture and implementation through deployment, operation, and scaling in production
• Develop retrieval algorithms and ranking systems that operate reliably at web scale

What you'll bring

• At least 3 years of hands-on systems programming experience with languages like Rust, C++, or C
• Demonstrated ownership of complete projects from concept through production deployment and scaling
• Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and their practical application in high-performance contexts
• Deep knowledge of multithreading and concurrency patterns, tradeoffs, and pitfalls
• Proficiency with Python or similar scripting languages for tooling and automation
• Solid understanding of Linux internals including syscalls, networking, memory models, and kernel tuning
• Experience building distributed, high-load services with hardware-aware optimization

Nice to have

• Background developing search engines, databases, or information retrieval systems
• Knowledge of search fundamentals including indexing, query parsing, ranking, and relevance algorithms
• Experience with latency-critical systems like trading platforms
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, AWS, and cloud infrastructure patterns