Member of Technical Staff (General Software Engineer, Infrastructure)

Perplexity is an AI-powered search company that delivers real-time answers at scale. The platform infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational systems behind every user interaction, handling real-time search, model serving, and agent workloads where millisecond latency and system reliability directly impact millions of users.

Perplexity is growing rapidly as demand for AI-driven search and reasoning continues to accelerate. The company operates complex distributed infrastructure across compute, storage, and data systems, and is looking for experienced engineers who can solve problems that span multiple infrastructure domains and shape how the entire organization approaches foundational technology.

What you'll do

• Own cross-cutting infrastructure challenges that touch compute, storage, networking, data, deployment, and reliability, including eliminating bottlenecks in retrieval and serving paths and resolving failures that span platform boundaries.

• Design, build, and operate distributed infrastructure systems that support Perplexity's consumer, AI, and enterprise workloads, taking ownership from architecture through production operations.

• Identify gaps between existing platforms and build shared abstractions, tooling, and automation that make infrastructure safer and more accessible across teams.

• Improve system performance, availability, scalability, and cost efficiency for both online request traffic and background workloads.

• Debug complex production incidents that cross service and infrastructure layers, then convert findings into lasting architectural improvements.

• Set technical direction for infrastructure systems, lead high-impact programs across teams, and establish technical standards through collaboration with infrastructure, product, AI, and security partners.

What you'll bring

• At least four years of professional experience building and operating production backend systems, platform infrastructure, or distributed systems at scale.

• A strong track record of owning complex production systems end to end and delivering sustained technical impact across multiple teams.

• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, lead through influence, and raise engineering standards through architecture and design reviews.

• Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust, C++, Java, or similar systems languages.

• Meaningful hands-on experience across at least two infrastructure domains such as cloud platforms, Kubernetes, databases, storage, networking, data systems, or production reliability.

• Ability to learn quickly in unfamiliar systems, reason across software and infrastructure layers, and drive production incidents from root cause analysis to durable resolution.

What they offer

• Full-time position in San Francisco with hybrid flexibility.