Staff Software Engineer (Agentic Search) - Runtime
Salary not listed • Zurich, Switzerland • Full-time
Posted 15d ago
About the job
Nebius is building an agent-native search platform designed specifically for AI systems, providing programmatic, low-latency, and observable search APIs for AI agents to retrieve, filter, and reason over real-world information at scale. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to focus on the runtime systems of this novel search engine, ensuring it can serve search queries in real time with high throughput and low latency. This role is critical for product quality, requiring optimization across all layers from request handling to data access and response assembly.
Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and operate core runtime services for serving search queries at scale.
- Build and optimize request flows, including query processing, retrieval orchestration, and response assembly under strict latency budgets.
- Develop systems that maintain performance and predictability under high load.
- Optimize CPU, memory, and data access patterns in performance-critical paths.
- Ensure reliability, observability, and predictability across production services.
- Build well-tested systems with clear responsibilities and interaction contracts.
- Define and implement observability primitives, including structured logs, metrics, traces, and latency breakdowns.
- Monitor throughput, latency, and resource usage, and drive improvements in performance and cost efficiency.
- Collaborate with indexing and ML teams to integrate retrieval and ranking components.
- Support experimentation and iteration through controlled rollouts and rigorous benchmarking.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience as a software engineer working on production backend systems.
- Strong hands-on expertise in C++ or Rust in real-world, high-load services.
- Experience building and operating high-load, low-latency user-facing systems handling thousands of RPS under strict latency constraints.
- Understanding of performance at a systems level (CPU, memory, networking, data access).
- Experience operating own code in production (deployment, debugging, rollback).
- Ability to think end-to-end about request flows.
- Ability to balance correctness, latency, and development velocity.
- Effective collaboration and communication skills in cross-functional settings.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation
- Career growth and learning opportunities
- Flexibility and ownership
- Collaborative and innovative culture
- Opportunity to work on impactful AI projects
- International environment and talented teams