Principal Rust Engineer

We are Progress (Nasdaq: PRGS) — the trusted provider of software that enables our customers to develop, deploy and manage responsible, AI-powered applications and experiences with agility and ease.

We're proud to have a diverse, global team where we value the individual and enrich our culture by considering varied perspectives because we believe people power progress. Join us as a Principal Rust Engineer and help us do what we do best: propelling business forward.

At Progress, you'll lead the technical direction of the search engine behind our Agentic RAG product: a distributed Rust platform for vector, full-text and knowledge-graph search, developed in the open as part of the NucliaDB project. You'll work from low-level index data structures up to the distributed architecture, together with ML, product and platform teams, and directly affect the quality, speed and cost of our product.

• Own the architecture and roadmap of our distributed search and indexing engine, written in Rust.
• Design and implement vector, full-text and graph indexes (HNSW, quantization, multi-vector, Tantivy) and the query and filtering layer on top of them.
• Evolve how indexes are built, merged, sharded and replicated on object storage, PostgreSQL and NATS.
• Lead large migrations and performance work, based on profiling and benchmarks, without customer downtime.
• Contribute to the Python services, SDKs and PyO3 bindings built on the engine, keeping public APIs stable.
• Keep the system observable, reliable and secure across Kubernetes deployments and CI/CD.
• Write design proposals, review code, mentor senior engineers and represent the project in the open-source community.

Technical skills

• Extensive experience building and running high-performance production systems, including technical leadership.
• Expert Rust: async (Tokio), concurrency, memory-mapped I/O, profiling and low-level optimization (e.g. SIMD).
• Deep knowledge of search engine internals: approximate nearest neighbour search, vector quantization, inverted indexes and ranking.
• Experience designing distributed data systems: storage engines, sharding, replication and consistency trade-offs.
• Solid experience with PostgreSQL, object storage (S3, GCS, Azure) and messaging (NATS JetStream or Kafka).
• Strong Python, ideally with PyO3, asyncio, FastAPI and Pydantic.
• Experience running services on Kubernetes with observability and CI/CD (ideally GitHub Actions).

Professional skills

• Ability to set technical direction and deliver it incrementally.
• Clear written and verbal communication in English, including design documents.
• Comfortable owning critical production systems and making decisions under pressure.
• You measure before optimizing and know when to simplify or remove code.
• Willing to mentor others, comfortable in a remote-first, global team.
• Additionally, it would be beneficial if you have:
• Experience with Tantivy, Lucene, vector databases or other search engines.
• Experience with knowledge graphs or graph-based retrieval (GraphRAG).
• Familiarity with embedding models, including multi-vector models (e.g. ColBERT).
• Experience maintaining open-source projects, including dependency auditing and licensing.

• 23 vacation days annually
• Birthday day off
• Community service time off
• International Women's Day - March 8 is an official holiday for all employees
• Life and Medical Insurance

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