Latency-Sensitive Backend & Infra Engineer

Perplexity; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking an Infrastructure Engineer to own and improve the backend systems powering our latency-sensitive search stack. You’ll work across high-QPS Rust and Go services, distributed retrieval systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, and deployment tooling.

This role blends infrastructure expertise with software engineering, taking systems from design through production and using AI-native tools to improve engineering workflows.

Qualifications

• Experience with cloud infrastructure and automation.
• Deep understanding of Linux internals, performance, and production debugging.
• Experience building or operating latency-sensitive, high-throughput backends.
• Experience with containers, orchestration, observability, and IaC.
• Experience building or maintaining CI/CD systems and release tooling.
• Fluency in at least one systems language such as Rust, Go, C++, or Java.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate scalable, low-latency infrastructure for search serving and retrieval.
• Design and improve distributed backend systems that handle high request volumes.
• Debug and optimize Linux systems, containers, networking, and production services.
• Improve reliability through observability, capacity planning, performance profiling, and incident response.
• Design, deploy, and operate cloud-native systems, primarily on AWS and Kubernetes.
• Build internal tools and automation for development, testing, debugging, and infra operations.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines, release processes, and production rollout safety.
• Contribute to product codebases in Rust, Go, and other systems languages.
• Own systems end to end, from architecture and implementation to deployment and production operation.

Skills

Cloud infrastructure

Distributed systems

Automation

Linux performance

Latency-sensitive

Containers & Kubernetes

Observability

Infrastructure as code

CI/CD tooling

Rust

Go

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

Perplexity is seeking an Infrastructure Engineer to own and improve the backend systems powering our latency-sensitive search stack. You’ll work across high-QPS Rust and Go services, distributed retrieval systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, and deployment tooling.

This role blends infrastructure expertise with software engineering, taking systems from design through production and using AI-native tools to improve engineering workflows.