Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)

Perplexity; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is looking for experienced backend engineers to join our team specializing in building high-performance APIs. You will be responsible for designing and optimizing mission-critical APIs that power frontier intelligence for various customers.

The ideal candidate will have over 5 years of experience with Python, Go, or Rust, and a solid understanding of API design and cloud environments. Join us to reshape how people search and interact with technology while enjoying a competitive compensation range of $220K - $405K.

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.
• Hands-on cloud experience, preferably with AWS.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs for customers.
• Optimize performance for low latency and high throughput.
• Collaborate across teams to incorporate new capabilities into the API Platform.

Skills

Backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust

High-traffic API design

Cloud experience (AWS preferred)

Fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices

Experience with modern AI APIs

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.

Compensation Range: $220K - $405K