Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)
Used Tools & Technologies
Not specified
Required Skills & Competences
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.
Security @ 3
Go @ 5
Kubernetes @ 5
DevOps @ 5
Python @ 5
CI/CD @ 5
Distributed Systems @ 3
AWS @ 5
Performance Optimization @ 3
Rust @ 5
API @ 3
AI @ 3
- 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.
Details
Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration to serve the world's most discerning users. The Perplexity API Platform brings our technology to the world's most discerning developers.
From exabyte-scale knowledge indexes to codegen-first agent runtimes, the building blocks behind Perplexity's applications are some of the most battle-tested AI systems in the industry. The API Platform delivers these building blocks as elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike.
About this role
Perplexity is seeking strong engineers with a passion for delivering frontier intelligence and infrastructure to developers. The API Platform engineering team designs, implements, and scales programmatic interfaces for Perplexity's technology. You'll work on distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and other frontier topics, prioritizing both developer and agent experience. You will also help define technical strategy to scale for growth in customers, agents per customer, and compute/retrieval per agent.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
- Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization (including on upstream systems).
- Reimagine customer needs of tomorrow and design architectures to serve those needs while faithfully 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: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
- Hands-on cloud experience (AWS preferred), along with fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices.
- Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards) is a strong plus.
- Strong customer empathy and product sense to build ergonomic, well-documented, and easy-to-adopt APIs.
Benefits
U.S. Benefits
Full-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.
International Benefits
Full-time employees outside the U.S. enjoy 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 are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.