Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Backend Platform)

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

About The Role

The Backend Platform team is the backbone of Perplexity’s product reliability, scalability, and performance, enabling every product and AI team to build with confidence.

About The Role

The Backend Platform team is the backbone of Perplexity’s product reliability, scalability, and performance, enabling every product and AI team to build with confidence.

This high‑impact group builds and maintains critical infrastructure, including backend systems for authentication, authorization, real‑time data flows, service orchestration, and sandboxing, to ensure fast, reliable, and secure user experiences. By setting rigorous standards for code quality, uptime and performance, the Platform team ensures everyone at Perplexity can innovate at speed on top of a robust, well‑architected foundation.

Key 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 our RBAC and authorization primitives, ensuring they scale with new product capabilities and enterprise controls.
• Own key backend services involved in authentication and encryption flows (including BYOK‑related pieces), 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.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and building backend systems that run in production (typically 4+ years for mid-level, more for senior and staff).
• Strong system design skills, with a track record of creating efficient, reliable, and scalable architectures.
• Hands‑on experience with modern infrastructure (for example AWS, Kubernetes, and related cloud technologies).
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, or Rust, and the ability to work effectively in a multi‑language environment.
• Collaborative mindset and eagerness to solve challenging technical problems with other experienced engineers.
• Comfort working in security‑sensitive areas (auth, authorization, encryption) and making pragmatic trade‑offs between safety, simplicity, and velocity.

Compensation Range: $220K - $405K