Member of Technical Staff (Backend/Infrastructure Engineer, Search)

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 looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to own and improve the backend systems behind 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 combines infrastructure expertise with software engineering. You’ll take systems from design through production operation and use AI-native tools where they meaningfully improve engineering and operational workflows.

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 infrastructure operations.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines, release processes, and production rollout safety.
• Contribute directly to product codebases across Rust, Go, and other systems languages.
• Own systems end to end, from architecture and implementation to deployment and production operation.

Requirements

• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and automation.
• Deep understanding of Linux internals, performance analysis, and production debugging.
• Experience building or operating latency-sensitive, high-throughput backend systems.
• Experience with containers, orchestration, observability, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience building or maintaining CI/CD systems and release tooling.
• Fluency in at least one systems language, such as Rust, Go, C++, or Java.
• Comfort working across infrastructure and application-level code.
• Strong ownership and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving environment.

Nice To Have

• Experience with search, retrieval, ranking, or other large-scale data-serving systems.
• Experience operating Rust services in production.
• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and modern observability systems.
• Experience with profiling, capacity planning, and performance optimization.
• Experience building AI-assisted developer or operational tooling.