Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)

Perplexity AI Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity AI Inc. in New York is seeking experienced backend engineers to deliver cutting-edge APIs for developers. Join a dynamic team focused on building technology that reshapes how users interact with AI.

The role involves designing and operating high-traffic APIs, prioritizing both performance and developer experience. Ideal candidates will have over 5 years of experience with languages like Python or Go, and proficiency in cloud environments.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
• Strong understanding of high-traffic API design including schema evolution and performance tuning.
• Cloud experience with AWS and modern DevOps practices.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs for frontier intelligence.
• Optimize performance for low latency and high throughput.
• Enhance system security and reliability across environments.

Skills

Backend engineering with Python, Go, or Rust

High-traffic API design

Cloud experience (AWS preferred)

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Modern DevOps practices

Customer empathy and product sense

Job description

Perplexity API Platform

Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration to serve the world's most discerning users. The Perplexity API Platform brings our technology to the world's most discerning developers.

From exabyte-scale knowledge indexes to codegen-first agent runtimes, the building blocks behind Perplexity's applications are some of the most battle-tested AI systems in the industry. We believe these same building blocks can and should power the aspirations of builders everywhere. It's one thing to solve planet-scale retrieval, long-horizon orchestration, and other foundational AI challenges within a single product ecosystem. The true measure of success is to turn those solutions into elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike.

Our API Platform delivers frontier intelligence to thousands of customers: startups, trillion-dollar enterprises, U.S. and allied governments, and everyone in between. We've achieved incredible scale, yet we're just getting started. Join us to build tools for curious minds.

About this role

Perplexity is seeking strong engineers with a passion for delivering frontier intelligence and infrastructure to developers. Our company builds technology that reshapes how people search, reason, and interact with the world around them. Week after week, we observe increasing demand for programmatic interfaces to that technology. The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling these interfaces.

As a member of our team, you'll work on an eclectic portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and frontier topics that often change with each passing month. Throughout this work, you'll prioritize great developer and agent experience alike. You'll also define technical strategy for how we scale to meet compounding growth exponentials (number of customers, agents per customer, compute/retrieval per agent, etc.).

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.

• Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization (including on upstream systems).

• Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today.

• Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments.

• Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs.

• Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.

• Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.

• Hands‑on cloud experience (AWS preferred), along with fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices.

• Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards) is a strong plus.

• Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well‑documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike.