Senior Backend Engineer (Distributed Systems / Search Infrastructure)

A globally ambitious AI infrastructure company is building next-generation retrieval and search systems designed to power AI agents at internet scale. The team is tackling large-scale engineering problems across web crawling, distributed indexing, vector search, retrieval infrastructure and high-performance backend systems. This is a highly technical, engineering-driven environment focused on building foundational infrastructure for the future of AI. The company operates massive-scale compute infrastructure including large GPU clusters and distributed batch processing systems, and is looking for engineers who enjoy solving genuinely hard systems problems. What you will work on:

• Build and optimize high-throughput, low-latency backend systems

• Design distributed systems that process and index massive amounts of web-scale data

• Develop large-scale crawling and retrieval infrastructure

• Work on search, ranking and vector retrieval systems

• Improve scalability, reliability and performance across the platform

• Build internal infrastructure and tooling for large-scale compute and data processing workloads

• Collaborate closely with a highly technical engineering team in a fast-moving environment

Desired Experience

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals

• Experience building or maintaining distributed systems at scale

• Experience working on high-throughput and/or low-latency systems

• Familiarity with large-scale data pipelines or infrastructure platforms

• Strong understanding of systems design, scalability and performance optimization

• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, high ownership environments

• Passion for solving difficult engineering problems

Nice To Have

• Experience with search infrastructure, information retrieval or vector databases

• Experience with distributed compute, GPU infrastructure or large-scale batch systems

• Experience with technologies such as Kubernetes, Ray, Kafka, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch or similar infrastructure tooling

• Experience with systems programming or performance-oriented languages such as Rust or C++

• Prior experience in AI infrastructure, ML infrastructure or large-scale platform engineering

Example Problems you've solved

• Building internet-scale crawling and indexing systems

• Designing ultra-low latency retrieval infrastructure

• Optimizing vector search across billions of records

• Scaling distributed systems that process millions of documents daily

• Building resilient infrastructure for massive compute workloads

Who This Would Suit This role is ideal for engineers who:

• Enjoy deep technical problems

• Care about performance and scalability

• Prefer building infrastructure over business CRUD systems

• Thrive in high-agency engineering cultures

• Want to work on foundational technology with global impact

Location

• Singapore-based

• Relocation support available globally for strong candidates

Compensation Competitive compensation package including equity.