Search Rust Engineer - Perplexity AI

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022 and growing rapidly as one of the world’s leading AI platforms. Perplexity has raised over $1B in venture investment from some of the world’s most visionary and successful leaders, including Elad Gil, Daniel Gross, Jeff Bezos, Accel, IVP, NEA, NVIDIA, Samsung, and many more. Our objective is to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making for people and assistive AI wherever decisions are being made. Throughout human history, change and innovation have always been driven by curious people. Today, curious people use Perplexity to answer more than 780 million queries every month–a number that’s growing rapidly for one simple reason: everyone can be curious. 

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

Requirements

• 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

https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/perplexityai/jobs/4955037007