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

Perplexity
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The opportunity

The Connector Platform team builds the data layer that lets Perplexity's agents reach into the world's software. This team owns the systems that turn hundreds of heterogeneous integrations (native, MCP, CLI, first-party, and third-party APIs) into one unified, reliable,…

What you'll do

  • Own the design and implementation of the connector runtime, the system that: registers, hosts, and executes built-in connectors, hosted MCP servers, and CLI-backed tools behind a single agent-facing interface.

  • Build and extend the semantic layer: tool and entity schemas, capability metadata, relationship modeling, and the mechanisms for capturing and applying organization- and account-specific corrections and knowledge.

  • Design the tool-discovery and tool-selection surfaces that agents use to find: the right connector and call it correctly, optimizing for both model accuracy and context efficiency.

  • Make agent loops robust: structured results, partial-failure and retry semantics, idempotency, pagination, rate-limit handling, and observability into every tool call an agent makes.

  • Define authentication, authorization, and credential-isolation patterns for: connectors (OAuth flows, BYOK, per-org credential boundaries), partnering with Security and Backend Platform on defense-in-depth.

  • Build the connector onboarding path (schemas, fixtures, and evaluation: suites) so new connectors ship with measurable quality rather than hope, and drive the eval metrics that tell us a connector actually works inside agent loops.

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 building efficient,: reliable, and scalable architectures, ideally including API integration, gateway, or platform-style systems with many heterogeneous downstreams.
  • 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.
  • Hands-on experience with modern infrastructure (for example AWS, Kubernetes, and related cloud technologies).
  • Depth in at least one of: OAuth and authorization protocols, API/connector or MCP-server development, schema and semantic modeling, or building tooling and evaluation for LLM-based agents.
  • Comfort working in security-sensitive areas (auth, authorization, credential: isolation) and making pragmatic trade-offs between safety, simplicity, and velocity.
  • Collaborative mindset and eagerness to solve hard, ambiguous problems alongside other experienced engineers.