Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)
Perplexity8 days ago
Base Salary
$220k - $405k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs for frontier intelligence capabilities.
- Own the API gateway and routing layer, including authentication, authorization, rate limiting, quotas, usage metering, and request routing.
- Build standardized service scaffolding, container builds, CI/CD, Kubernetes and Helm deployment, progressive rollouts, and rollback capabilities.
- Develop API governance tooling covering contract-first schemas, breaking-change detection, versioning, deprecation, generated SDKs, and documentation.
- Unify billing, usage, rate limiting, identity, analytics, and observability capabilities across API products.
- Optimize performance for low latency and high throughput, including upstream systems.
- Harden security and reliability, define SLOs, participate in on-call and incident response, and operate the systems built.
- Collaborate with infrastructure teams on compute, networking, secrets, and security.
- Lead design reviews, maintain code quality, and create internal documentation.
Requirements
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
- Significant experience building platforms or infrastructure used by other engineering teams.
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design, schema evolution, versioning, idempotency, authentication, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
- Hands-on experience with API gateways, reverse proxies, or routing layers and their authentication, authorization, traffic shaping, and observability capabilities.
- Experience building API governance tooling, including contract-first design, API linting, breaking-change detection, versioning, deprecation workflows, and generated SDKs and documentation.
- Experience owning CI/CD pipelines, container builds and base images, infrastructure as code, and progressive delivery on a major cloud.
- Track record of owning platforms end to end, from identifying needs through design, delivery, alignment, and operations.
- Strong customer empathy and product sense for creating ergonomic, well-documented APIs.
- Experience with modern AI APIs, latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards, usage-based billing, metering, multi-tenant identity, usage analytics, structured logging, metrics, tracing, or SLO tooling is a strong plus.
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.