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.

In this role, you will:

• 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.

Your background:

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.

If this sounds like you and fits your experience and career goals, we'd be happy to chat.

Compensation

• Generous remuneration package
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan Enrollment

Vacation, Family, and Health

• 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

Apply now!

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