Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Backend Platform)

at Perplexity AI

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

USD 220,000-405,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ 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 AWS @ 4 Go @ 7 Kubernetes @ 4 Mentoring Observability Python @ 7 Rust @ 7 Security @ 6 Technical Leadership

Details

About the Role

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.

Responsibilities

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.

Requirements

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.
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.
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.