Backend Software Engineer, Perplexity

Search, Crawler Team

Salary not provided

AWS

Kubernetes

Python

C++

Rust

Senior and Expert level

London

In office M-W-F

3 days a week in office

Conversational AI-powered search tool

Job no longer available

Conversational AI-powered search tool

1001+ employees

B2CArtificial IntelligenceDeep TechMachine Learning

Job no longer available

Salary not provided

AWS

Kubernetes

Python

C++

Rust

Senior and Expert level

London

In office M-W-F

3 days a week in office

1001+ employees

B2CArtificial IntelligenceDeep TechMachine Learning

Company mission

To advance the way people discover and share information.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

Minimum of 5 years of software development experience, with strong knowledge of data structures and algorithms in at least one of the following languages: Python, C++, Rust, or Go
Experience with large-scale web crawlers is highly desirable
Proven experience building, deploying, and optimizing high-load, distributed, and hardware-adjacent services
Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, with hands-on experience in Kubernetes (K8s) and AWS
Demonstrated passion for writing clean, efficient, and scalable systems

What the job involves

We are seeking an experienced Backend Software Engineer to join our Crawler team
In this role, you will design, develop, and operate systems that ingest, process, and manage web-scale data in support of our next generation of advanced search technologies
This is a critical, high-impact engineering position, requiring expertise across both backend and frontend components of our data acquisition stack
Take ownership of and lead projects focused on developing large-scale web crawlers, ingestion pipelines, and data processing systems
Build, maintain, and optimize core backend and frontend components for crawler services, including storage, retrieval, and UI dashboards for data management
Collaborate closely with Search and Infrastructure teams to ensure the reliable, high-quality ingestion and processing of billions of web pages
Architect and implement fullstack features and scalable distributed systems that handle high-load and real-time data operations
Rapidly iterate, experiment with novel approaches, and continuously enhance system performance, usability, and reliability

Salary benchmarks

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.

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