Member of Technical Staff (General Software Engineer, Infrastructure)Active$220K–$405K

Perplexity
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The opportunity

The Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational systems behind Perplexity’s products. At Perplexity, infrastructure sits on the critical path of every answer, supporting real-time search, retrieval, model serving, and agent workloads where latency, reliability, and…

What you'll do

  • Own cross-cutting infrastructure problems that span compute, storage,: networking, data, deployment, and reliability, including eliminating bottlenecks across retrieval and serving paths, building shared abstractions across deployment environments, and resolving failure modes that cross platform boundaries.

  • Design, build, and operate distributed infrastructure supporting Perplexity’s: consumer, AI, and enterprise workloads, owning systems from architecture through production operation.

  • Identify gaps between existing platforms and build shared abstractions,: automation, and tooling that make infrastructure easier and safer to use.

  • Improve system performance, availability, scalability, and cost-efficiency: across online request traffic and background workloads.

  • Debug complex production issues across service and infrastructure boundaries,: then turn the findings into durable architectural improvements.

  • Set technical direction for complex infrastructure systems, lead high-impact: programs across teams, and establish durable technical standards through collaboration with infrastructure, product, AI, and security partners.

What they're looking for

  • + years of professional software engineering experience building and: operating production backend, platform, or distributed systems.
  • A track record of owning complex production systems end to end and delivering: sustained technical impact across teams.
  • Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, lead through influence, and: raise the engineering bar through architecture, design reviews, and mentorship.
  • Strong software engineering skills in Python or other systems or backend: languages such as Go, Rust, C++, or Java.
  • Meaningful experience across at least two infrastructure domains, such as: cloud platforms, distributed systems, Kubernetes, storage, databases, networking, data systems, developer infrastructure, or production reliability.
  • Ability to develop depth quickly in unfamiliar systems, reason across: software and infrastructure layers, and drive production incidents from diagnosis through durable resolution.