Principal Rust Engineer
Progress Software Corporation17 days ago
Remote, SpainStaff+
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture and roadmap of the distributed Rust search and indexing engine.
- Design and implement vector, full-text, and graph indexes, including HNSW, quantization, multi-vector, and Tantivy-based capabilities.
- Develop query and filtering layers and evolve index building, merging, sharding, and replication across object storage, PostgreSQL, and NATS.
- Lead large migrations and performance initiatives using profiling and benchmarks without customer downtime.
- Contribute to Python services, SDKs, and PyO3 bindings while maintaining stable public APIs.
- Operate and improve system observability, reliability, and security across Kubernetes deployments.
- Write design proposals, review code, mentor senior engineers, and represent the project in the open-source community.
Requirements
- Extensive experience building and operating high-performance production systems with technical leadership.
- Expert-level Rust experience, including async programming with Tokio, concurrency, memory-mapped I/O, profiling, and low-level optimization such as SIMD.
- Deep knowledge of search-engine internals, including approximate nearest-neighbor search, vector quantization, inverted indexes, and ranking.
- Experience designing distributed data systems involving storage engines, sharding, replication, and consistency trade-offs.
- Strong experience with PostgreSQL, S3, GCS, Azure, and messaging systems such as NATS JetStream or Kafka.
- Strong Python skills, ideally including PyO3, asyncio, FastAPI, and Pydantic.
- Experience running services on Kubernetes with observability and CI/CD, ideally using GitHub Actions.
- Ability to set technical direction, deliver incrementally, communicate clearly in English, and make decisions under pressure.
- Willingness to mentor others and own critical production systems in a remote-first global team.
- Preferred experience includes Tantivy, Lucene, vector databases, other search engines, knowledge graphs, GraphRAG, embedding and multi-vector models such as ColBERT, and open-source maintenance including dependency auditing and licensing.
Benefits
- Generous remuneration package and Employee Stock Purchase Plan enrollment.
- 23 vacation days annually, a birthday day off, community service time off, and International Women's Day as an official holiday.
- Life and medical insurance.
- Remote-first work arrangement in a global team.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Progress Software Corporation
Progress Software builds commercial software for developers and IT teams, including UI components (Telerik/Kendo UI), app platform (OpenEdge), CMS (Sitefinity), data connectivity (DataDirect), DevOps automation (Chef), secure file transfer (MOVEit), network monitoring (WhatsUp Gold), and load balancing (Kemp LoadMaster). It sells licenses and subscriptions with support to enterprises and software vendors. Founded in 1981 and headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, Progress is a public company on NASDAQ under the ticker PRGS.