Staff Developer Experience Engineer

at Perplexity AI
📍 New York City, United States
📍 Palo Alto, United States
📍 San Francisco, United States
USD 250,000-300,000 per year
SENIOR
✅ On-site

SCRAPED

Used Tools & Technologies

Not specified

Required Skills & Competences ?

Docker @ 4 Go @ 4 Kubernetes @ 4 TypeScript @ 4 Python @ 4 CI/CD @ 6 Distributed Systems @ 4 Leadership @ 4 Communication @ 4 Mentoring @ 6 Rust @ 4 Debugging @ 4 Technical Leadership @ 4

Details

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022. The company builds accurate, trustworthy AI to power decision-making and assistive AI. Perplexity serves hundreds of millions of queries per month and has raised significant venture investment.

Perplexity is seeking a Staff Developer Experience Engineer (DevEx) to take technical ownership of developer infrastructure, lead architectural initiatives, and drive cross-functional collaboration to optimize the development experience across the engineering organization. The ideal candidate has deep expertise in build systems, containerization, CI/CD, testing frameworks, and large-scale infrastructure; mentors other engineers; influences technical strategy; and ensures developer tools scale with Perplexity's AI-driven platform.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the design and architecture of scalable developer infrastructure systems to empower engineers.
  • Drive cross-team initiatives to improve reliability, speed, and efficiency of large builds and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Own and evolve technical strategy for developer tooling, delivering incremental improvements while establishing long-term architectural vision.
  • Mentor engineers across teams and provide technical leadership on complex infrastructure challenges.
  • Lead evaluations of external tools, vendors, and technologies for alignment with the AI platform architecture.
  • Design and maintain seamless development environments and IDE integrations across multiple languages (Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust).
  • Establish and enforce standards for testing, deployment, and monitoring to enable safe, rapid software delivery at scale.
  • Collaborate with engineering leadership to identify and resolve developer productivity bottlenecks.
  • Champion operational excellence and developer empathy across the organization.
  • Drive adoption of new technologies and practices to improve engineering velocity and code quality.

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of engineering experience, with 3+ years leading end-to-end architecture and infrastructure projects at staff-level or equivalent.
  • Demonstrated technical leadership designing, implementing, and scaling developer productivity platforms in high-growth environments (AI, SaaS, or large-scale cloud preferred).
  • Expertise in build systems (Bazel, Buck, or similar), orchestration/containerization tools (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD frameworks.
  • Experience integrating new languages and frameworks into existing infrastructure.
  • Strong programming skills in multiple languages including Python, TypeScript, Go, or Rust.
  • Experience leading architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and influencing cross-organizational technical direction.
  • Experience with observability, monitoring, and debugging tools for distributed systems.
  • Experience with AI/ML infrastructure and tooling is strongly preferred.
  • Exceptional communication skills and a track record of building and maintaining internal developer tools, testing frameworks, and deployment infrastructure.
  • Focus on developer empathy, operational excellence, and anticipating company-scale challenges.

Compensation

  • Cash compensation range: $250,000 - $300,000 per year.
  • Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including experience and expertise.
  • Equity may be part of the total compensation package.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents.
  • 401(k) plan and other standard benefits.