Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)

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

Job summary

Perplexity invites experienced backend engineers to join the API Platform in San Francisco. You will design, implement, and operate mission-critical APIs that enable frontier intelligence for developers and agents, with a focus on low latency and high throughput.

You will work across distributed systems, orchestration, and performance tuning, leveraging AWS, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD practices to scale as customers grow.

Qualifications

• 5+ years backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
• Experience designing high-traffic APIs with latency considerations.
• Cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and DevOps proficiency.

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.
• Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow while serving today’s workloads.
• Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments.
• Collaborate across teams to incorporate frontier capabilities into the API Platform.
• Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and documentation.

Skills

API design & distributed systems

Performance optimization

DevOps practices

Collaborative teamwork

Tools

Python

Go

Rust

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