Member of Technical Staff (Site Reliability Engineer, Crawler)

Perplexity; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 125,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking a seasoned Site Reliability Engineer to keep crawler platforms productive. You’ll optimize Kubernetes workloads, plan capacity, and improve reliability through safer deployments, observability, and durable fixes.

You’ll define SLOs, build monitoring with Datadog/Prometheus, and own incident response. Strong Python/C++, Go or Rust skills, cloud infra experience, and IaC tooling are essential for sustaining high availability at scale.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in SRE, production engineering, or infrastructure-heavy backend roles.
• Hands-on cloud infrastructure, production Kubernetes, Terraform, and automated deployments.
• Strong Linux and networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, HTTP, and load balancing.
• Experience diagnosing distributed-system failures and leading production incidents, improving performance.

Responsibilities

• Operate and optimize Kubernetes workloads and supporting infrastructure for crawler services.
• Build and maintain infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines, with safe rollouts, validation, and fast rollback.
• Define SLOs and build monitoring, alerting, and observability for availability, latency, throughput, and resource saturation.
• Own capacity planning and resource efficiency; diagnose queue backlogs, network failures, and bottlenecks with service owners.
• Participate in on-call rotation, lead incident response, and turn blameless postmortems into durable reliability improvements.
• Write production software to automate diagnosis and routine remediation, with validation and approval gates for high-impact actions.

Skills

SRE / production engineering

Backend systems

Python

C++

Rust

Go

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Datadog

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

Keeping a crawler running is not the same as keeping it productive. Queues can grow while servers look healthy, and a small change can become a fleet-wide bottleneck. On Perplexity's Crawler team, you'll improve throughput, plan capacity, and build operational reliability through safer deployments, better observability, and durable fixes.

Responsibilities

• Operate and optimize Kubernetes workloads and supporting infrastructure for crawler services, including fetching and rendering fleets.
• Build and maintain infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines, with safe rollouts, validation, and fast rollback.
• Define SLOs and build monitoring, alerting, and observability for availability, latency, throughput, and resource saturation.
• Own capacity planning and resource efficiency; diagnose queue backlogs, network failures, and resource bottlenecks with service owners.
• Participate in the team's on-call rotation, lead incident response, and turn blameless postmortems into durable reliability improvements.
• Write production software to automate diagnosis and routine remediation, with validation and approval gates for high-impact actions.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in SRE, production engineering, or infrastructure-heavy backend roles, with strong programming skills in Python, C++, Rust, or Go.
• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, production Kubernetes, infrastructure as code such as Terraform, and automated deployment workflows.
• Strong Linux and networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, HTTP, and load balancing.
• Experience building observability with tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana, and using SLOs to guide reliability improvements.
• Proven experience diagnosing distributed-system failures, leading production incidents, and improving system performance or resource efficiency.

Nice to have

• Experience operating web crawlers, search infrastructure, or browser fleets at scale.
• Experience with distributed queues, backpressure, workload isolation, or multi-region recovery.