Backend Engineer, Multimodal AI Voice Systems

Perplexity; California (MO); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is hiring a backend engineer for the Multimodal team to design and scale live voice sessions and the surrounding infrastructure. You will own end-to-end backend systems, including per-session workers, routing, and real-time streaming.

You will work across the stack with SDK and client teams to ship new voice and multimodal capabilities, build scalable services, and ensure reliability in production environments.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend or distributed systems.
• Strong experience in Rust, Python, or Go (we work primarily in Rust and Python).
• Experience designing and operating production distributed systems: streaming RPC (gRPC or similar), stateful services, message-driven architectures, and failure recovery.
• Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure — deploying, scaling, and operating services on AWS or equivalent.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions.
• Genuine interest and adoption of AI products and willingness to learn quickly.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale the backend session-worker architecture that powers realtime voice: durable per-session workers, provider routing, and stateful streaming over gRPC.
• Own distributed-systems problems end-to-end — session lifecycle, crash recovery, reconnection and replay, multi-region deployment, and graceful degradation under real production load.
• Build provider-agnostic streaming protocols from our backend to the Rust SDK that powers voice across every client stack.
• Drive new products and initiatives in voice and multimodal AI from problem definition through technical design, implementation, and launch.
• Build the orchestration layer that lets live voice models delegate work to tools, agents, and long-running tasks — safely, asynchronously, and at scale.
• Partner closely with SDK, client, infrastructure, and model teams; work across the stack when the product demands it, from backend services to client-facing APIs.

Skills

4+ years backend engineering

Rust

Python

Go

Job description

Perplexity is hiring a backend engineer for the Multimodal team to design and scale live voice sessions and the surrounding infrastructure. You will own end-to-end backend systems, including per-session workers, routing, and real-time streaming.

You will work across the stack with SDK and client teams to ship new voice and multimodal capabilities, build scalable services, and ensure reliability in production environments.