Member Of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Backend API)

Details

Perplexity is looking for engineers who want to put planet-scale search in the hands of every developer and every agent. The API Platform is one of the fastest-growing surfaces of the company, and the team behind it owns all of it: the Search API, the Agent API, agent-first SDKs, documentation, and everything from the request path to the developer experience.

You'll work at the boundary where Perplexity's infrastructure meets the outside world and help shape that boundary as agents become the dominant consumers of APIs.

The team is hiring for both product-minded API engineers who care about schema design, SDK ergonomics, and a developer's first five minutes with the platform, and infrastructure-focused platform engineers who care about progressive delivery, observability, and keeping a high-traffic API stack fast and reliable.

Responsibilities

• Own critical APIs end to end: write the RFC, ship the implementation, roll it out from staging through canary to the full fleet, and continue iterating after launch.
• Contribute directly to product codebases across Go, Rust, and Python.
• Build the surfaces agents consume, including hosted MCP, tool calling, connectors, and authentication flows that let agents onboard and operate independently.
• Harden the platform for enterprise use, including authentication patterns, data-handling guarantees, guardrails, and the security posture of a public API under real load.
• Own production operations, including monitors and dashboards as code, actionable alerts, and postmortems that lead to improvements.
• Partner with Research to evaluate frontier capabilities and turn promising capabilities into production API features.
• Work directly with Product, GTM, and customers to identify gaps between what builders need and what the platform offers.

Requirements

• Experience designing and operating distributed, high-load systems.
• Daily experience building with frontier models and tools, both open source and closed source, with the ability to explain your agentic workflow in detail.
• High autonomy and agency paired with strong product sense, including an understanding of developers, customers, API users, and the direction of the frontier.
• Working fluency with the core cloud infrastructure stack, including a major cloud provider, Kubernetes, and CI/CD.
• Depth in at least one of API product development or platform operations, along with genuine interest in the other.

Nice To Have

• Experience building agent loops or harnesses.
• Experience building developer or API tooling in the LLM ecosystem or adjacent domains where API schemas evolve rapidly under real customer load, such as fintech or payments.
• Contributions to open-source SDKs, frameworks, or integrations used by developers.

Benefits

• Full-time U.S. employees receive benefits 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 factors including experience and expertise.