Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Backend Platform)

Perplexity; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity in San Francisco seeks a Backend Platform Engineer to enhance its product reliability and scalability. You'll lead the design of backend systems, focusing on sandboxing, authorization, and authentication, while setting standards for reliability and incident response.

The ideal candidate has 4+ years of backend experience, strong system design skills, and is proficient in languages like Python or Go. This is a unique opportunity to innovate on infrastructure and lead a team of skilled engineers in a challenging technical environment.

Qualifications

• 4+ years experience designing and building backend systems in production.
• Strong system design skills with efficient, reliable architectures.
• Hands-on experience with cloud technologies such as AWS and Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of sandboxing platform.
• Define RBAC and authorization primitives.
• Own backend services for authentication and encryption.
• Set technical standards for backend platform design.
• Partner with product and AI teams for platform interfaces.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring.

Skills

System design

Backend development

Collaborative problem solving

Security-sensitive development

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

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.

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.

If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above.