Software Engineer, Perplexity AI

• 4+ years of industry experience in software engineering
• Direct experience building or scaling billing, payments, subscription, or monetization systems
• Deep familiarity with payment processors (Stripe, Square, etc) — including subscriptions, invoicing, disputes, refunds, and webhooks
• Demonstrated experience of and appetite for building in-house billing solutions that rival leading best-in-class buy options
• Strong backend engineering skills in Python with the ability to reason about complex distributed systems
• Experience working with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and making data-informed decisions to prioritize work
• Self-motivated with strong ownership instincts — you ship major features ahead of schedule or add feature improvements without asking for permission
• Track record of cross-functional collaboration with Finance, Support, or Growth stakeholders

Desirable

• Perplexity is seeking a Software Engineer to own and evolve the billing platform that powers monetization across all Perplexity products
• You'll build the abstractions and infrastructure that let product teams launch new paid offerings, run pricing experiments, and convert users into paying customers — without needing to understand billing internals
• This is a high-leverage role on a small team
• The usage-based billing system this team owns is the foundation that monetizes Perplexity Computer and our agentic products — metering every action an AI agent takes in real time, enforcing credit budgets, and settling costs across entirely new interaction models
• You'll work across subscriptions, usage-based billing, and enterprise contracts to ensure every revenue path is reliable, observable, and easy to extend
• Design and maintain billing API abstractions that enable product teams to ship new SKUs, pricing models, and monetization experiments with minimal friction
• Build and operate the subscription, invoicing, and usage-based billing systems that serve millions of users across consumer and enterprise plans
• Establish reliability standards for billing — tiered SLOs organized by customer impact, proactive monitoring, and alerting to catch revenue-affecting issues before customers do
• Partner with Finance, Data Science, Growth, and Security teams to ensure billing data is accurate, auditable, and compliant
• Expand payment method coverage and optimize authorization rates to improve conversion globally
• Build internal tooling that empowers Support and Finance teams to diagnose and resolve billing issues quickly
• Collaborate with security and privacy teams to build secure, compliant checkout and payment flows