Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Backend Platform)Active$220K–$405K

Perplexity
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The opportunity

The Backend Platform team is the backbone of Perplexity’s product reliability, scalability, and performance, enabling every product and AI team to build with confidence.

What you'll do

  • Lead the design and implementation of our sandboxing platform to safely: execute untrusted and user‑generated code while meeting strict performance and reliability requirements.

  • Define and extend our RBAC and authorization primitives, ensuring they scale: with new product capabilities and enterprise controls.

  • Own key backend services involved in authentication and encryption flows: (including BYOK‑related pieces), partnering with Security and Infra on defense‑in‑depth.

  • Set the technical bar for backend platform design and operations, driving: best practices in reliability, observability, and incident response for always‑on systems.

  • Partner with product and AI teams to define clear platform interfaces, SLAs,: and integration patterns so new features can reliably build on shared backend capabilities.

  • Provide technical leadership across the backend platform area, mentoring: other engineers and making long‑term architectural decisions that keep the foundation simple, secure, and evolvable.

What they're looking for

  • Experience designing and building backend systems that run in production: (typically 4+ years for mid-level, more for senior and staff).
  • Strong system design skills, with a track record of creating efficient, reliable, and scalable architectures.
  • Hands-on experience with modern infrastructure (for example AWS, Kubernetes, and related cloud technologies).
  • Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, or: Rust, and the ability to work effectively in a multi-language environment.
  • Collaborative mindset and eagerness to solve challenging technical problems with other experienced engineers.
  • Comfort working in security‑sensitive areas (auth, authorization, encryption): and making pragmatic trade-offs between safety, simplicity, and velocity.