Engineering Overview: Principal Rust Vector Search Engine Architect (HNSW & SIMD)
Qdrant's core storage and indexing engine uses custom memory-mapped HNSW graphs, scalar/product quantization, and asynchronous direct I/O to achieve sub-millisecond p99 recall at billion-vector scale. Design disk-backed HNSW graph traversal over Linux io_uring, tune Raft shard consensus rebalancing, and write hand-vectorized distance functions.
Responsibilities
- Design and maintain high-throughput Rust subsystems centered on io_uring, Raft, Tonic.
- Eliminate mutex contention and unnecessary serialization copies across internal RPC and storage boundaries.
- Collaborate asynchronously with senior systems architects across Europe / US Remote.
Qualifications & Total Rewards
- Proven systems engineering background in Rust, including deep knowledge of Raft, Tonic, RocksDB.
- Ability to reason from first principles about CPU cache lines, I/O bandwidth, and distributed consensus trade-offs.
- Transparent pay band: $175,000 to $235,000 USD base salary, equity ownership, and hardware stipend.
