Staff Software Engineer (Agentic Search) - Crawler

Location: Zurich, Switzerland

Department: Agentic Search

The Product

In a rapidly evolving world, trust in AI depends on AI agents being grounded in fresh, verified real-world data. Search is the foundation that makes this possible.

We are building an agent-native search platform designed specifically for AI systems rather than human users. Our product provides programmatic, low-latency, and observable search APIs that AI agents use to retrieve, filter, and reason over real-world information at scale.

The Role

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to work on the content acquisition and crawling infrastructure of a novel search engine tailored for agentic AI consumption.

In this role, you will focus on building systems that discover, fetch, and continuously refresh content from the open web and other large-scale data sources. You will design distributed crawling, scheduling, and ingestion infrastructure capable of operating at internet scale while balancing coverage, freshness, resource efficiency, and reliability. You will work on systems that process billions of URLs, manage high-throughput data flows, and ensure that high-quality content is consistently available to downstream indexing and retrieval systems.

In this position, your responsibility will be to:

• Design, implement, and operate web-scale crawling systems for acquiring content from the internet
• Build ingestion workflows for internal and external data sources, including crawlers, structured feeds, and partner integrations
• Develop crawl scheduling, prioritisation, recrawl policies, and freshness strategies
• Build systems for URL discovery, deduplication, content extraction, and crawl orchestration
• Ensure reliable operation of crawling infrastructure under high-throughput conditions
• Define observability and quality metrics for crawl coverage, freshness, throughput, and content quality
• Monitor resource usage, bandwidth consumption, and infrastructure cost
• Collaborate with indexing and ML teams to ensure acquired content meets retrieval and ranking requirements
• Enable safe experimentation with crawling strategies and content acquisition policies

You may be a good fit if you:

• 8+ years of experience building backend or distributed systems
• Strong Go or C++ expertise 
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems (10k+ RPS, billions of URLs, high-throughput pipelines)
• Understanding of web protocols (HTTP, DNS, TLS), crawling, scraping, and content extraction
• Experience operating production systems and debugging failures in distributed environments
• Strong understanding of scalability, fault tolerance, and resource management

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• Web crawling
• Building streaming data pipelines and event-driven systems
• Kafka, Pulsar, NATS, RabbitMQ, or similar messaging platforms
• Designing distributed schedulers, queues, and asynchronous processing systems
• Spark, Flink, Beam, or MapReduce
• Ad tech, social networks, search engines, or other large-scale content platforms

We conduct coding interviews as part of the process.