Perplexity
Technology
MemberofTechnicalStaff(BackendSoftwareEngineer,APIPlatform)
Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.
“Member of Technical Staff (Backend Software Engineer, API Platform) at Perplexity. Skills: API Platform, Backend Engineering, Distributed Systems, Agent Orchestration. Design mission-critical APIs. Build mission-critical APIs”
Industry & Context.
Performance tuning; Troubleshooting
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
5+ years backend engineering, 5+ years Python, Go, or Rust, High-traffic API design understanding, Hands-on AWS services experience, Kubernetes fluency, CI/CD fluency, Modern DevOps practices fluency
Nice to Have
LLM or natural-language APIs experience
What You'll Do.
Design mission-critical APIs
Build mission-critical APIs
Operate mission-critical APIs
Lead technical initiatives
Improve system reliability
Improve system security
Implement rate limiting
Implement authentication
Implement observability
Implement automated testing
Collaborate across teams
Extend existing systems
Build specialized services
Translate customer needs
Uphold engineering excellence
Conduct design reviews
Maintain code quality
Create internal documentation
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
Collaborate across teams
Communication Scope
Internal documentation
Full Job Description
PERPLEXITY API PLATFORM Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration to serve the world's most discerning users. The Perplexity API Platform brings our technology to the world's most discerning developers. From exabyte-scale knowledge indexes to codegen-first agent runtimes, the building blocks behind Perplexity's applications are some of the most battle-tested AI systems in the industry. We believe these same building blocks can and should power the aspirations of builders everywhere. It's one thing to solve planet-scale retrieval, long-horizon orchestration, and other foundational AI challenges within our own product ecosystem. The true measure of success is to turn those solutions into elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike. Our API Platform delivers frontier intelligence to thousands of customers: startups, trillion-dollar enterprises, U.S. and allied governments, and everyone in between. We've achieved incredible scale, yet we're just getting started. Join us to build tools for curious minds. ABOUT THIS ROLE Perplexity is seeking strong engineers with a passion for delivering frontier intelligence and infrastructure to developers. Our company builds technology that reshapes how people search, reason, and interact with the world around them. Week after week, we observe increasing demand for programmatic interfaces to that technology. The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling these interfaces. As a member of our team, you'll work on an eclectic portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and frontier topics that often change with each passing month. Throughout this work, you'll prioritize great developer and agent experience alike. You'll also define technical strategy for how we scale to meet compounding growth exponentials (number of customers, agents per customer, compute/retrieval per agent, etc.). KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
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