Member of Technical Staff, Perplexity

Software Engineer, Model Platform

$220-405k

+ Equity

AWS

Kubernetes

Python

C++

Rust

Senior and Expert level

San Francisco Bay Area

Conversational AI-powered search tool

Be an early applicant

Conversational AI-powered search tool

1001+ employees

B2CArtificial IntelligenceDeep TechMachine Learning

Be an early applicant

$220-405k

+ Equity

AWS

Kubernetes

Python

C++

Rust

Senior and Expert level

San Francisco Bay Area

1001+ employees

B2CArtificial IntelligenceDeep TechMachine Learning

Company mission

To advance the way people discover and share information.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

5+ years of experience building and shipping large-scale systems and services with high reliability, availability, and performance
Strong software engineering craft, with special care for developer experience and designing future-proof systems that can evolve along with a rapidly advancing AI landscape
Proficiency with a general-purpose backend language (Python, Rust, C++, Go) and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes)
BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or related fields (or equivalent experience)

What the job involves

Perplexity is looking for a deeply technical software engineer to own and evolve our model serving platform, which is responsible for connecting our products and research systems with our inference layers. This mission-critical system gives teams one fast, reliable interface across providers
You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, AI products, and infrastructure. You will make it dramatically easier for teams across Perplexity to adopt new models, run rigorous experiments, and ship dependable products
The ideal candidate combines sound technical judgment forged in production systems with active curiosity around the rapidly changing capabilities and failure modes of frontier models
You will design core abstractions, lead high-conviction technical decisions, and write production Rust and Python for a service that serves hundreds of millions of model requests per day

Our take

As AI continues to drive changes in both business operations and day-to-day lives, Perplexity delivers an intelligent search engine powered by conversational AI, to improve search outcomes and "unlock the power of knowledge" for all.

Reaching impressive heights of 22M monthly visits, Perplexity's "ask anything" method of search is clearly a popular one. And what sets it apart from other search engines is in its answers, which are concise and fully cited, responding to the user query rather than simply providing a place in which they can scroll to find it themselves.

The company has raised substantial funding, with contributions from former execs at companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Quora, demonstrating the interest that it has drummed up in the space. Having doubled its annual recurring revenue between 2023 and 24, this investment has allowed Perplexity to continue building out its product, and accelerate growth into the future.

Kirsty

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

Top investors

Trustpilot (1.5)

Company

Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)

Sep 2025

$200m

LATE VC

Jul 2025

$100m

LATE VC

Total funding: $1.8bn

Company HQ

Financial District, San Francisco, CA

Leadership

Aravind Srinivas

(Co-Founder, President & CEO)

Former Research Scientist at OpenAI, who has interned in Research at Google and Deep Mind. Obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Denis Yarats

(Co-Founder & CTO)

Prior to co-founding Perplexity in 2022, Denis was an AI Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research, a Staff ML Engineer at Quora, and a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft.

Johnny Ho

(Co-Founder & CSO)

Previously a Quantitative Trader at Tower Research Capital, and Engineer at Quora.

Salary benchmarks

We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.

Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.

Share this job

View 84 more jobs at Perplexity