Member of Technical Staff, Perplexity
Software Engineer, Infrastructure
$220-405k
+ equity
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Be an early applicant
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$220-405k
+ equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend, platform, or distributed systems
- A track record of owning complex production systems end to end and delivering sustained technical impact across teams
- Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, lead through influence, and raise the engineering bar through architecture, design reviews, and mentorship
- Strong software engineering skills in Python or other systems or backend languages such as Go, Rust, C++, or Java
- Meaningful experience across at least two infrastructure domains, such as cloud platforms, distributed systems, Kubernetes, storage, databases, networking, data systems, developer infrastructure, or production reliability
- Ability to develop depth quickly in unfamiliar systems, reason across software and infrastructure layers, and drive production incidents from diagnosis through durable resolution
- If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above
What the job involves
- The Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational systems behind Perplexity’s products. At Perplexity, infrastructure sits on the critical path of every answer, supporting real-time search, retrieval, model serving, and agent workloads where latency, reliability, and rapid iteration directly shape the user experience
- This role is for strong infrastructure engineers whose experience spans multiple domains and who are energized by cross-cutting problems that do not fit neatly within a single platform team
- You do not need to be a specialist in every area. Scope ranges from owning major production systems to setting technical direction across teams, leading complex infrastructure programs, and shaping infrastructure strategy across the organization
- If a specialized Cloud Infrastructure, Storage Platform, Backend Platform, Data Platform, Connector Platform, or AI Acceleration role clearly matches your expertise and interests, apply directly to it. If your experience spans several infrastructure domains or you are most energized by cross-cutting systems problems, apply here. Submit one application, and we will consider you across the Infrastructure organization
- Own cross-cutting infrastructure problems that span compute, storage, networking, data, deployment, and reliability, including eliminating bottlenecks across retrieval and serving paths, building shared abstractions across deployment environments, and resolving failure modes that cross platform boundaries
- Design, build, and operate distributed infrastructure supporting Perplexity’s consumer, AI, and enterprise workloads, owning systems from architecture through production operation
- Identify gaps between existing platforms and build shared abstractions, automation, and tooling that make infrastructure easier and safer to use
- Improve system performance, availability, scalability, and cost-efficiency across online request traffic and background workloads
- Debug complex production issues across service and infrastructure boundaries, then turn the findings into durable architectural improvements
- Set technical direction for complex infrastructure systems, lead high-impact programs across teams, and establish durable technical standards through collaboration with infrastructure, product, AI, and security partners
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
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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