Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Multimodal)Active$220K–$405K
The opportunity
We are hiring builders to define how people talk to, show things to, and hear from AI In 2026, we launched Computer, the defining product for the new era of agentic AI. We've scaled beyond the millions of people using Perplexity every day for research, shopping, investing and…
What you'll do
Design, build, and scale the backend session-worker architecture that powers: realtime voice: durable per-session workers, provider routing, and stateful streaming over gRPC.
Own distributed-systems problems end-to-end: session lifecycle, crash recovery, reconnection and replay, multi-region deployment, and graceful degradation under real production load.
Build provider-agnostic streaming protocols from our backend to the Rust SDK: that powers voice across every client stack.
Drive new products and initiatives in voice and multimodal AI from problem: definition through technical design, implementation, and launch.
Build the orchestration layer that lets live voice models delegate work to: tools, agents, and long-running tasks — safely, asynchronously, and at scale.
Partner closely with SDK, client, infrastructure, and model teams; work: across the stack when the product demands it, from backend services to client-facing APIs.
What they're looking for
- + years of professional software engineering experience building backend or distributed systems.
- Strong experience in Rust, Python, or Go (we work primarily in Rust and Python).
- Experience designing and operating production distributed systems: streaming RPC (gRPC or similar), stateful services, message-driven architectures, and failure recovery.
- Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure: deploying, scaling, and operating services on AWS or equivalent.
- Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions.
- Genuine interest and adoption of AI products and willingness to learn quickly.
