Software Engineer P2P - Search Team
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Software Engineer P2P - Search Team based in Ireland.
This is an opportunity to work on next-generation decentralized search technology within a highly distributed engineering environment.
You will help build resilient, serverless search infrastructure based on true peer-to-peer architecture and decentralized data discovery.
The role combines hands-on software engineering with opportunities to explore research-driven approaches to distributed systems and information retrieval.
You will contribute to technologies capable of indexing and searching text, images, conversations, locations, and other forms of data without relying on a centralized index.
The position is well suited to engineers who enjoy complex technical challenges and prefer turning innovative ideas into production-ready systems.
You will work on high-performance, highly concurrent networking software and contribute to protocols designed for resilience, scalability, and decentralization.
Strong curiosity, technical depth, and a builder mindset will be essential in shaping this evolving technology stack.
Accountabilities
- Design and develop next-generation peer-to-peer search infrastructure based on decentralized and serverless architectures.
- Build resilient distributed systems capable of operating without a centralized search index or traditional server infrastructure.
- Develop and optimize distributed indexing mechanisms and search architectures for different types of data, including text, images, chats, and locations.
- Contribute to peer-to-peer networking components, including connectivity, transport reliability, multiplexing, NAT traversal, and encryption.
- Design and implement high-performance, highly concurrent networking code with a focus on scalability, reliability, and efficiency.
- Work with distributed data structures, databases, CRDTs, and decentralized synchronization mechanisms.
- Research, evaluate, and implement approaches related to Kademlia DHTs, skip graphs, prefix hash trees, m-LIGHT, locality-sensitive hashing, and other distributed search techniques.
- Apply information retrieval principles such as recall, precision, ranking, lexical search, semantic search, and inverted indexes to decentralized search systems.
- Test, benchmark, evaluate, and optimize network protocols and distributed search components.
- Investigate complex technical problems, translate research findings into practical solutions, and maintain a strong bias toward implementation.
- Contribute to the evolution of the P2P technology stack, including components such as hyperdht, hyperswarm, hypercore, hyperbee, hyperdrive, and udx-native.
- Collaborate with a globally distributed engineering team to design robust solutions and continuously improve system performance and resilience.
Requirements
- Strong professional software engineering experience with a passion for distributed systems, peer-to-peer technology, networking, or search.
- Deep understanding of one or more relevant areas, such as Kademlia DHT, distributed indexing, distributed databases, CRDTs, P2P networking, or information retrieval.
- Knowledge of TCP/IP, transport-layer connection and reliability models, network multiplexing, NAT traversal, and encryption.
- Familiarity with distributed search and indexing research, including technologies or concepts such as skip graphs, prefix hash trees, m-LIGHT, or locality-sensitive hashing.
- Strong understanding of classical information retrieval and search engine architecture, including recall versus precision, ranking algorithms, lexical and semantic search, and inverted indexes.
- Experience developing high-performance and highly concurrent networking or distributed software.
- Ability to test, evaluate, benchmark, and optimize network protocols and distributed systems.
- Strong interest in technical research combined with a practical, implementation-focused mindset.
- Familiarity with distributed databases, synchronization mechanisms, and conflict-free replicated data types is highly valuable.
- Experience with decentralized or peer-to-peer technologies is a strong advantage.
- Familiarity with the Holepunch ecosystem, particularly hyperdht, hyperswarm, hypercore, hyperbee, hyperdrive, or udx-native, would be advantageous.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to work through complex systems-level challenges.
- Excellent English communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively within a globally distributed team.
Benefits
- 100% remote working environment with the opportunity to collaborate with a global engineering team.
- Opportunity to work on innovative peer-to-peer and decentralized technologies with significant technical depth.
- Exposure to challenging problems across distributed systems, networking, search, cryptography, and information retrieval.
- Opportunity to combine research-oriented thinking with hands-on software development.
- Ability to contribute to systems designed for resilience, decentralization, and global-scale data discovery.
- Collaborative environment with highly technical colleagues working across different parts of the world.
- Opportunity to help shape emerging technologies rather than simply maintaining established systems.