Perplexity AI
Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Backend Platform)
- Compensation
- $220K–$405K / yr
- Location
- New York, United States; Palo Alto, United States; San Francisco, United States
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Middle
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 4+ years
- Category
- Backend
- Posted
Skills
Full description
- The Backend Platform team is the backbone of Perplexity’s product reliability, scalability, and performance, enabling every product and AI team to build with confidence
- This high‑impact group builds and maintains critical infrastructure, including backend systems for authentication, authorization, real-time data flows, service orchestration, and sandboxing, to ensure fast, reliable, and secure user experiences
- By setting rigorous standards for code quality, uptime and performance, the Platform team ensures everyone at Perplexity can innovate at speed on top of a robust, well-architected foundation
- Lead the design and implementation of our sandboxing platform to safely execute untrusted and user‑generated code while meeting strict performance and reliability requirements
- Define and extend our RBAC and authorization primitives, ensuring they scale with new product capabilities and enterprise controls
- Own key backend services involved in authentication and encryption flows (including BYOK‑related pieces), partnering with Security and Infra on defense‑in‑depth
- Set the technical bar for backend platform design and operations, driving best practices in reliability, observability, and incident response for always‑on systems
- Partner with product and AI teams to define clear platform interfaces, SLAs, and integration patterns so new features can reliably build on shared backend capabilities
- Provide technical leadership across the backend platform area, mentoring other engineers and making long‑term architectural decisions that keep the foundation simple, secure, and evolvable
- Hands-on experience with modern infrastructure (for example AWS, Kubernetes, and related cloud technologies)
- Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, or Rust, and the ability to work effectively in a multi-language environment
- Collaborative mindset and eagerness to solve challenging technical problems with other experienced engineers
- Experience designing and building backend systems that run in production (typically 4+ years for mid-level, more for senior and staff)
- Strong system design skills, with a track record of creating efficient, reliable, and scalable architectures
- Comfort working in security‑sensitive areas (auth, authorization, encryption) and making pragmatic trade-offs between safety, simplicity, and velocity
- If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above