Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)
Perplexity3 months ago
Base Salary
$220k - $405k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide customers with building blocks for frontier intelligence.
- Improve latency and throughput through aggressive performance optimization, including optimization of upstream systems.
- Define architectures and technical strategy that support current workloads and compounding growth.
- Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments.
- Collaborate across teams to incorporate frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customers.
- Maintain 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, including schema evolution, versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
- Hands-on cloud experience, preferably with AWS, and fluency with Kubernetes and modern DevOps practices.
- Experience with modern AI APIs, latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, and emerging technical standards is a strong plus.
- Strong customer empathy and product sense, with the ability to build ergonomic, well-documented, developer-friendly APIs.
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.