About The Team
As part of the Search, Recommendation, Ads (Engineering & Architecture) team, We build and operate the search engine that powers retrieval and ranking across the company. The system is built on Vespa (a 1.7M-line C++/Java codebase) and runs at scale across hundreds of nodes. Our work spans the full stack: cluster orchestration, HNSW-based vector indexing, rank expression evaluation, capacity planning, and the developer tooling that keeps all of it shippable. We care a lot about correctness, latency tails, and operational simplicity.
Job Description
- Design, implement, and operate components of the search engine — indexing, query execution, ranking, or storage using C++
- Improve indexing and retrieval performance: SIMD-friendly data layouts, cache-aware algorithms, lock contention
- Extend vector search capabilities (HNSW and beyond) and integrate them cleanly with traditional inverted-index retrieval
- Build tooling and automation that makes the team faster — capacity models, fault-injection tests, deployment checks, AI-assisted workflows
- Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and on-call rotation
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree or higher in Computer Science
- At least 5 years of full time backend development experience using C++
- Experience working on a search engine, database, or storage system such as Vespa is preferred
- Familiarity with vector search and ANN algorithms (HNSW, IVF, PQ).
- Solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, and systems. You can reason about cache behavior, memory layout, and concurrency..
- Experience operating non-trivial services in production: profiling, debugging core dumps, reading flamegraphs, tracing distributed requests.
- Comfortable working in a large existing codebase.
- Strong written communication. You write design docs and PR descriptions that the next on-call can actually use.
