Member of Technical Staff (Backend Software Engineer)
Job Description
Perplexity is looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to join our small team revolutionizing the way people search and interact with the internet. You will be responsible for leading design, implementation, and scaling of backend systems that power web, mobile, and browser products.
Tech Stack: Python | Go | Rust | TypeScript | FastAPI | PostgreSQL | Redis | Docker | vLLM | AWS
Teams Hiring
Backend Platform
The Platform team is the backbone of Perplexity’s product reliability, scalability, and performance, enabling every product and AI team to build with confidence. This small, high-impact group builds and maintains critical infrastructure—from backend systems such as authentication, real-time data flows, and service orchestration to frontend frameworks that ensure fast, reliable, and secure user experiences. By setting rigorous standards for code quality, uptime, and developer productivity, the Platform team ensures everyone at Perplexity can innovate at speed on top of a robust, well-architected foundation.
Data Platform
The Data Platform team builds the backbone for how data is ingested, processed, stored, and served across Perplexity, enabling product features, analytics, experimentation, AI workloads, and the company’s data lake. This is a highly technical, high-leverage team responsible for shaping the architecture of our batch and streaming systems, orchestration and observability stack, and self-serve data platform, while making thoughtful use of external platforms like Databricks and Snowflake alongside open-source technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Dagster, dbt, Iceberg, Delta Lake, and ClickHouse. Experience building data products or contributing to open-source data infrastructure is a strong plus.
Developer Experience
DevX (Developer Experience) empowers engineers across Perplexity to build, ship, and iterate faster than ever. The team owns internal platforms for source control, build, test, and deployment—removing friction from every step of product development. They architect seamless onboarding, blazing-fast CI/CD, and developer tools that unlock creativity and safety at scale. Through deep collaboration and high autonomy, the DevX team amplifies the impact of every engineer, making rapid, reliable innovation possible across the company.
Cloud Infrastructure
The Cloud Infra team architects and operates the mission-critical cloud infrastructure behind Perplexity’s global platform. This team designs and scales compute, storage, and networking systems for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, blending a mix of proactive project work and operational support. The team collaborates closely with product, AI research, security, and the rest of Perplexity’s teams to ensure our services are always available, reliable, and as fast as curiosity demands—building infrastructure that grows in lockstep with user and model scale.
Responsibilities
Build scalable systems that ingest and process data from the web, files, and other sources.
Optimize interfaces that interact with databases and caching systems.
Collaborate with PMs, frontend engineers, and other stakeholders to understand product requirements.
Work closely with AI, Search, and Data Science teams to iterate on non-deterministic systems.
Manage a complex orchestration system with many moving parts and interfaces.
Scale, optimize, and load balance multiple services with rapidly changing needs.
Qualifications
Strong experience with Python
Strong experience with databases and caching
Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure at scale
Experience working with high-scale data and non-deterministic systems like LLMs
4+ years of engineering experience
AI is at the heart of what we build, and using it effectively is an expectation for every role here. During interviews, we want to see how you think and make decisions—qualities that will directly influence our AI development. With that in mind, please avoid using AI tools throughout the process unless we indicate otherwise.