Backend Platform Engineer: Scale, Security & Reliability

Perplexity; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking a Backend Platform Engineer to design and implement scalable sandboxing, RBAC, and critical backend services, including authentication and encryption workflows. You will collaborate with Security, Infra, and product teams to define interfaces and SLAs.

You will mentor engineers, raise the technical bar for reliability, and help shape the platform to support fast, secure product innovation across multiple teams.

Qualifications

• 4+ years designing and building backend systems in production.
• Excellent system design skills with scalable architectures.
• Hands-on with AWS, Kubernetes, and related cloud technologies.
• Proficient in Python, Go, or Rust; multi-language collaboration.
• Security-focused, with experience in auth, authorization, and encryption.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of our sandboxing platform to safely execute untrusted and user‑generated code while meeting strict performance and reliability requirements.
• Define and extend RBAC and authorization primitives, ensuring they scale with new product capabilities and enterprise controls.
• Own key backend services involved in authentication and encryption flows, partnering with Security and Infra on defense‑in‑depth.
• Set the technical bar for backend platform design and operations, driving best practices in reliability, observability, and incident response for always-on systems.
• Partner with product and AI teams to define clear platform interfaces, SLAs, and integration patterns so new features can reliably build on shared backend capabilities.
• Provide technical leadership across the backend platform area, mentoring other engineers and making long-term architectural decisions that keep the foundation simple, secure, and evolvable.

Skills

Backend design

System design

Cloud infrastructure

Python/Go/Rust

Security in auth/encryption

Mentoring/leadership

Job description

Perplexity is seeking a Backend Platform Engineer to design and implement scalable sandboxing, RBAC, and critical backend services, including authentication and encryption workflows. You will collaborate with Security, Infra, and product teams to define interfaces and SLAs.

You will mentor engineers, raise the technical bar for reliability, and help shape the platform to support fast, secure product innovation across multiple teams.