Member of Technical Staff (Site Reliability Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure)

Details

Perplexity serves hundreds of millions of queries a month. Every answer, every Perplexity Computer task, and every enterprise deployment runs on production infrastructure owned by the Cloud Infrastructure team: a fleet of Kubernetes clusters across a multi-account AWS estate, private networks that reach hyperscalers and neoclouds serving the company's models, and the storage underneath user data and agentic workloads. The team is looking for SREs who treat reliability as a software problem. You will own compute, networking, and storage at scale and keep production stable while everything built on top of it changes rapidly.

Responsibilities

• Own production at scale: Run the compute, networking, and storage foundation behind Perplexity's consumer, Computer, API, and enterprise products, and own its availability, latency, and cost.
• Run the Kubernetes fleet: Operate and upgrade EKS clusters hosting web services, search, datastores, and secure sandboxes. Tune scheduling, autoscaling, node lifecycle, DNS, and service networking so clusters remain healthy under bursty, fast-growing load.
• Engineer the network: Design and operate VPC architectures, Transit Gateway and PrivateLink connectivity, load balancing, DNS, and egress across accounts, regions, and cloud providers.
• Keep data durable and fast: Own the storage layer, including EBS, S3, DynamoDB, and the managed databases and caches on which services depend. Manage performance, durability, backups, and tested restores.
• Manage everything as code: Run infrastructure through Terraform and CI/CD. Build reusable modules and guardrails, making every change reviewable, repeatable, and safe to roll back.
• Prepare for failures: Define SLOs, build actionable alerts, design for zone and regional failure, and run game days and disaster-recovery exercises that prove recovery works.
• Lead incident response: Drive incidents to resolution, write blameless postmortems, and implement fixes to prevent recurring failures.
• Scale ahead of demand: Own capacity planning, quotas, reservations, and cost efficiency so product launches and traffic spikes do not wait on infrastructure.
• Automate away toil: Build increasingly agent-driven tooling that turns provisioning, upgrades, and remediation into self-service, hands-off workflows for engineering teams.

Requirements

• Deep AWS expertise, including VPC, IAM, EC2, EKS, ELB, Route 53, S3, and EBS, including their limits, failure modes, and costs.
• Production Kubernetes experience at scale, including cluster upgrades, CNI, CoreDNS, autoscalers such as Karpenter, and debugging misbehaving nodes.
• Terraform mastery, including designing module structures, managing state across many accounts, and performing large refactors and imports without disrupting production.
• Strong networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, and routing.
• Ability to write production code in Python, Go, or Rust for automation, tooling, and controllers.
• Fluency with observability tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana, and the ability to turn metrics, logs, and traces into meaningful SLOs and alerts.
• A track record of leading production incidents and turning root-cause analysis into durable fixes.
• Ability to own problems end-to-end and work effectively when the path forward is not fully defined.

Additional Experience Valued

• Multi-region active-active or failover architectures and disaster-recovery programs with real recovery targets.
• Proxies, service meshes, and kernel-level networking, including Envoy, Istio, Cilium, or eBPF.
• GitOps and progressive delivery with Argo CD, Flux, or similar tools.
• Enterprise and compliance environments, including single-tenant or BYOC deployments, KMS/BYOK, and SOC 2 or similar controls.
• Running stateful systems in production, including Postgres, Redis, and search engines such as Vespa or Elasticsearch.
• Multi-cloud or neocloud operations with GCP, CoreWeave, or similar platforms.
• FinOps, including cost attribution, Savings Plans, reservations, and reducing infrastructure costs without compromising reliability.

Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more. Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region of residence. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set based on the local market. Final offer amounts depend on multiple factors, including experience and expertise.