Backend Software Engineer, Perplexity AI
API
$180-230k
+ Equity
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Open for applications
Conversational AI-powered search tool
21-100 employees
Open for applications
$180-230k
+ Equity
21-100 employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- The ideal candidate should have experience building systems, infrastructure, scaling, testing, and maintenance
- Understand good practices of building and working with natural language/LLM APIs
- Have experience managing infrastructure for API products
- Have a good intuition for what will last and scale
- Have experience in ensuring great user experience and ease of use of features and products you build
- 4+ years of engineering experience
What the job involves
- Perplexity is looking for a 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 systems that power our API products
- Our backend stack is Python, Postgresql, DynamoDB, Redis, and Kubernetes, built alongside dedicated inhouse AI and search interfaces
- Design, build, expand and maintain APIs and services
- Scope and lead large technical projects, laying the groundwork for early-stage products to iteratively evolve and scale
- Work with engineers across the company to understand when existing infrastructure can be leveraged vs. when building a bespoke solution is prudent
- Align our technical decisions with the company’s broad strategic initiatives, while also advocating for needs specific to emerging new API initiatives
- Should be able to generalize specific customer requests and build features that are applicable to the broader user base of the product
Our take
As artificial intelligence 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 10 million monthly visits, Perplexity's "ask anything" method of search is clearly a popular one. 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
Some candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
May 2024
$250m
LATE VC
Apr 2024
$62.7m
LATE VC
Total funding: $415m
Company benefits
- Equity
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents
- 401(k)
- Generous home-office stipend
Company values
- Ownership - You want to build something special. Something you want to share, something you are proud of, something that keeps you up at night if it’s not good enough
- Velocity - Rush into the unknown, build something, test it, share it, make it better. You understand that velocity comes from decisiveness, execution skills, and investment in systems that scale
- Utility - In the midst of tremendous novelty, we must discover how to take new technology and turn it into something that millions of people want to use every day
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Articles
Leadership
Aravind Srinivas
(Co-Founder & 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)PhD Student in AI at NYU. Former AI Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research, and Staff ML Engineer at Quora.
Johnny Ho
(Co-Founder & CSO)Previously a Quantitative Trader at Tower Research Capital, and Engineer at Quora.
Andy Konwinski
(Co-Founder)Co-Founder and Advisor at Databricks. Co-Founder and General Partner at CS Graduate Ventures, and Instructor at the University of California, Berkeley.
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