Backend Platform Engineer: Secure & Scalable Infra

Perplexity; California (MO); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking an experienced Backend Platform engineer to design and implement scalable backend systems that power authentication, authorization, and data flows. You will work across product teams to raise reliability and performance.

You will mentor engineers, define platform interfaces, and drive best practices in observability and incident response, while balancing safety, simplicity, and velocity in security-sensitive areas.

Qualifications

• Production backend systems design and implementation experience.
• Strong system design skills for scalable architectures.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and cloud tech.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or Rust; multi-language environment work.
• Collaborative mindset for cross-team problem solving.
• Comfort with security-sensitive areas (auth, encryption) and pragmatic trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of sandboxing platform with performance and reliability.
• Define and extend RBAC and authorization primitives at scale.
• Own backend services in authentication and encryption flows; collaborate with Security and Infra.
• Set technical bar for backend platform design, reliability, observability, and incident response.
• Partner with product and AI teams to define platform interfaces, SLAs, and integration patterns.
• Provide technical leadership across backend platform and mentor engineers.

Skills

System design

Backend development

Security awareness

Multi-language

Mentoring

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Job description

Perplexity is seeking an experienced Backend Platform engineer to design and implement scalable backend systems that power authentication, authorization, and data flows. You will work across product teams to raise reliability and performance.

You will mentor engineers, define platform interfaces, and drive best practices in observability and incident response, while balancing safety, simplicity, and velocity in security-sensitive areas.