Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Storage Platform)

Perplexity; California (MO); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity’s Storage Platform team builds the core data infrastructure powering all Perplexity products and AI workloads. You will design and operate scalable storage across relational, NoSQL, and vector databases, ensuring high availability and low latency.

You will own SLOs, drive performance improvements, and collaborate with AI, infra, and product teams to model data and optimize access patterns. This is a high-impact role with end-to-end ownership and capacity planning for storage clusters.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend or infrastructure systems in production.
• Deep hands-on experience with at least one major database technology and familiarity with modern cloud storage services.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization for high-throughput, low-latency workloads.
• Proven track record of owning services end-to-end, including design, implementation, deployment, and on-call.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python for backend systems.
• Effective communication and collaboration with product, infra, and AI teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, operate, and continuously improve the storage platform that underpins all Perplexity products and AI workloads, including relational, NoSQL, and vector databases.
• Own reliability, performance, and availability SLOs for stateful systems, driving root cause analysis and long-term fixes for storage-related incidents.
• Define and evolve opinionated storage abstractions, APIs, and tooling that make it simple and safe for product teams to consume storage at scale.
• Partner with AI, infra, and product teams to design data models and access patterns that meet low-latency, high-throughput, and cost-efficiency requirements.
• Lead capacity planning, benchmarking, and lifecycle management for storage clusters, including scaling, migrations, and deprecations.

Skills

Backend experience

Distributed systems

Go

Rust

Python

Data modeling

On-call ownership

Tools

Postgres

MySQL

DynamoDB

Cassandra

Job description

About the Role

The Storage Platform team owns the infrastructure that powers how Perplexity persists, retrieves, and manages data across all systems, ensuring high availability, performance, and cost-efficiency for every product and AI workload.

This foundational, high-impact group is responsible for the full spectrum of storage technologies – relational databases, vector databases, custom storage implementations, and the tooling to provision, monitor, and optimize them at scale.

By building robust abstractions and operational excellence around storage, the team enables engineers across Perplexity to focus on product innovation while trusting that data is fast, reliable, and always accessible.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, operate, and continuously improve the storage platform that underpins all Perplexity products and AI workloads, including relational, NoSQL, and vector databases.

• Own reliability, performance, and availability SLOs for stateful systems, driving root cause analysis and long‑term fixes for storage‑related incidents.

• Define and evolve opinionated storage abstractions, APIs, and tooling that make it simple and safe for product teams to consume storage at scale.

• Partner with AI, infra, and product teams to design data models and access patterns that meet low‑latency, high‑throughput, and cost‑efficiency requirements.

• Lead capacity planning, benchmarking, and lifecycle management for storage clusters, including scaling, migrations, and deprecations.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and operating large‑scale backend or infrastructure systems in production.

• Deep hands‑on experience with at least one major database technology (for example, Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, Cassandra) and familiarity with modern cloud storage services.

• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization for high‑throughput, low‑latency workloads.

• Proven track record of owning services end‑to‑end, including design, implementation, deployment, and on‑call.

• Proficiency in at least one programming language used for backend systems (such as Go, Rust, or Python).

• Effective communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner closely with product, infra, and AI teams.