Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Backend Platform)
Perplexity3 months ago
Palo Alto, CA, USA +2 moreMid Level
H1B sponsor
Base Salary
$220k - $405k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and implement a sandboxing platform for safely executing untrusted and user-generated code under strict performance and reliability requirements.
- Define and extend RBAC and authorization primitives for new product capabilities and enterprise controls.
- Own backend services supporting authentication and encryption flows, including BYOK-related components, in partnership with Security and Infrastructure teams.
- Set backend platform standards for reliability, observability, and incident response across always-on systems.
- Partner with product and AI teams on platform interfaces, SLAs, and integration patterns.
- Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, and make long-term architectural decisions for the backend platform.
Requirements
- At least 4 years of experience designing and building backend systems running in production, with more experience expected for senior and staff levels.
- Strong system design skills and a track record of creating efficient, reliable, and scalable architectures.
- Hands-on experience with modern infrastructure such as AWS and Kubernetes.
- Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, or Rust, plus the ability to work in a multi-language environment.
- Experience working in security-sensitive areas including authentication, authorization, and encryption.
- Ability to collaborate with experienced engineers and make pragmatic trade-offs among safety, simplicity, and velocity.
About Perplexity
Perplexity builds an AI-powered answer engine for web and mobile and an enterprise product, Perplexity Computer, for AI-driven workflows across tools and apps. The company monetizes through individual subscriptions (Perplexity Pro) and enterprise plans. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, it operates as a privately held company.