Backend Software Engineer, Perplexity AI
$180-300k
4 days a week in office
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Be an early applicant
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$180-300k
4 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- Strong experience with Python
- Strong experience with databases and caching
- Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure at scale
- Experience working with high-scale data and non-deterministic systems like LLMs
- 4+ years of engineering experience
What the job involves
- Perplexity is looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to join our small team revolutionizing the way people search and interact with the internet
- You will be responsible for leading design, implementation, and scaling of backend systems that power web, mobile, and browser products
- Teams Hiring
- Enterprise:
- The Enterprise Team at Perplexity designs and builds core platform features like rich file attachments, secure file and app connectors (using cutting-edge Model Context Protocol), and Spaces for streamlined collaboration—capabilities widely used by both enterprise and regular users
- The team owns uniquely challenging domains at the intersection of AI, automation, and knowledge management, directly shaping how millions of people work with private data, files, and productivity apps across Perplexity
- Their small, expert group operates with high autonomy, developing systems that set industry standards and deliver massive, visible product impact
- Growth:
- The Growth team shapes how millions of people experience Perplexity. We rapidly experiment and launch new ideas across all user-facing surfaces at Perplexity including onboarding, verticals like Students, and premium Max Tier
- We build AI-powered features such as personalized prompts, auto-generated study guides, and contextual upsell nudges, driving user activation, retention, and revenue across all platforms
- We own Perplexity’s growth platform, including experimentation framework, feature flagging, and notifications, to mobilize impactful feature development across the company
- Engineers have outsized impact, building both the product and the platform that power our company’s growth
- Billing:
- The Billing team powers how users subscribe to and pay for Perplexity, building seamless subscription experiences across all tiers
- We partner with business and finance teams to define new pricing and subscription models, while also driving growth through partner integrations that expand distribution and brand presence
- We develop and maintain secure, scalable systems—including agentic payments that autonomously interact with payment platforms—ensuring reliable financial transactions for millions of users worldwide
- By shaping both user experience and revenue infrastructure, the Billing team sits at the core of Perplexity’s growth and sustainability
- Consumer Verticals:
- With AI-powered exploration and browsing, personalization and memory, live data visualization, comparison, and checkout, Perplexity is reimagining the consumer experience across verticals such as travel, shopping, health, real estate, finance, sports, live events and ticketing, and more
- Each of these verticals represents an opportunity for Perplexity to disrupt massive markets dominated by slower-moving incumbents
- Agentic actions powered by Comet unlock novel consumer experiences such as automated shopping and travel purchases, restaurant reservations, complete travel itineraries planned and booked from scratch, automated investing, and more
- Special Projects:
- Special Projects is a team dedicated to building 0-1 products that redefine the future of search
- Our mandate is to iterate fast, deliver high quality experiences, and reinvent the role of AI in search, social media, and personal computing
- By joining the Special Projects team, you will be given extreme ownership to deliver new consumer experiences and transform how people search the web and find answers
- You will be expected to own projects end to end, to ship fast, and work through obstacles.We are looking for a talented Full Stack Engineer to join our team to help reinvent the future of search and AI assistants
- Our current stack is Python, Docker, Kubernetes, NextJS, and React
- In this role, you'll work on various projects that combine bleeding edge AI, consumer apps, and multi-modal capabilities (text, voice, image, video)
- Build scalable systems that ingest and process data from the web, files, and other sources
- Optimize interfaces that interact with databases and caching systems
- Collaborate with PMs, frontend engineers, and other stakeholders to understand product requirements
- Work closely with AI, Search, and Data Science teams to iterate on non-deterministic systems
- Manage a complex orchestration system with many moving parts and interfaces
- Scale, optimize, and load balance multiple services with rapidly changing needs
- Tech Stack: Python, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, FastAPI
Our take
As AI continues to drive changes in both business operations and day-to-day lives, Perplexity AI 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 will allow Perplexity AI to continue building out its product, and accelerate growth into the future.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Sep 2025
$200m
LATE VC
Jul 2025
$100m
LATE VC
Total funding: $1.7bn
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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