Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)

📍 New York City, United States
📍 San Francisco, United States

USD 220,000-405,000 per year

MIDDLE

✅ On-site

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI @ 1 API @ 6 AWS @ 3 CI/CD @ 5 DevOps @ 5 Distributed Systems Go @ 5 Kubernetes @ 5 Performance Optimization Python @ 5 Rust @ 5 Security

Details

Perplexity's API Platform delivers frontier intelligence and infrastructure to developers, serving startups, enterprises, governments, and other customers. The team builds elegant, scalable APIs on top of systems for large-scale retrieval, agent orchestration, and AI infrastructure.

The role involves working across distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and emerging AI technologies. The engineer will help define the technical strategy for scaling the platform across growing numbers of customers, agents, compute requirements, and retrieval workloads, while prioritizing developer and agent experience.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide customers with building blocks for frontier intelligence.
Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization, including optimization of upstream systems.
Anticipate future customer needs and design architectures to support them while serving current customer workloads.
Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments.
Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customers.
Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.

Requirements

5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
Strong understanding of high-traffic API design, including schema evolution and versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
Hands-on cloud experience, with AWS preferred.
Fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices.
Experience with modern AI APIs, including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, and emerging technical standards, is a strong plus.
Strong customer empathy and product sense, with a focus on building APIs that are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy for developers and agents to adopt.

Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees receive benefits including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.