Backend Software Engineer - Search

1 Month ago • 5 Years + • Backend Development • $80,000 PA - $160,000 PA

Job Summary

Job Description

The Backend Software Engineer will design, implement, and maintain critical parts of a large-scale search engine, improving its performance and capabilities. The role involves architecting, developing, and optimizing core search infrastructure to support data ingestion, indexing, and querying. Responsibilities include continuously monitoring and improving the speed, scalability, and efficiency of search pipelines, managing search clusters and services using cloud tools, and collaborating with product and machine learning teams to align search capabilities with business goals and user needs.

Must have:

5+ years of experience with Python, Java and/or C++
Development of distributed systems
Kubernetes (K8s)
AWS (SQS, DynamoDB, EC2, S3, Lambda)
Apache Spark
Performance testing

Good to have:

Search system development (indexing/runtime/crawling)
MLOps development and/or operations

8 skills required

8 skills required for this role

Add these skills to join the top 1% applicants for this job

cpp

performance-testing

aws

spark

kubernetes

python

java

machine-learning

Job Details

Perplexity is looking for a Search Backend Engineer to join our small team revolutionizing the way people search and interact with the internet. Your passion and diligence will be critical to ensure a high quality product.

Responsibilities

You will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining critical parts of a large-scale search engine, improving its performance and capabilities
Architect, develop, and optimize core search infrastructure to support large-scale data ingestion, indexing, and querying
Continuously monitor and improve the speed, scalability, and efficiency of search pipelines, including query parsing, retrieval, and result ranking
Manage search clusters and services using modern cloud infrastructure tools (AWS, Kubernetes, etc.), ensuring high availability and fault tolerance
Work closely with product teams, data engineers, and machine learning teams to ensure search capabilities align with business goals and user needs

Qualifications

5+ years of hands-on experience with Python, Java and/or C++
Development of distributed systems
Kubernetes (K8s)
AWS (SQS, DynamoDB, EC2, S3, Lambda)
Apache Spark
Performance testing

Bonus

Search system development (indexing/runtime/crawling)
MLOps development and/or operations

The cash compensation range for this role is $80,000 - $160,000.

At Perplexity, we've experienced tremendous growth and adoption since publicly launching the world's first fully functional conversational answer engine just over a year ago. Our AI-powered search assistant has amassed 10 million monthly active users as of early 2024, with our mobile apps installed over 1 million times across iOS and Android devices. In 2023 alone, we served over 500 million queries from users around the globe.

To support our rapid expansion, we've raised significant funding from some of the most respected investors in technology. In January 2024, we raised $73.6 million in a Series B round led by IVP, with participation from NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos' investment fund, NEA, Databricks, and other prominent firms. We followed that up with a $62.7 million Series B1 round in April 2024 led by Daniel Gross, valuing Perplexity at over $1 billion.

Our prominent investor base includes IVP, NEA, Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Naval Ravikant, Tobi Lutke, and many other visionary individuals.