Site Reliability Engineer - Cloud Infra at Scale

Perplexity; California; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to own compute, networking, and storage at scale. You will ensure availability, latency, and cost across consumer, computer, API, and enterprise products while the platform evolves rapidly.

You will run our Kubernetes fleet, design resilient VPCs, manage data stores, and drive infrastructure as code with Terraform and CI/CD. You will lead incident response, define SLOs, and run game days to prove recovery.

Qualifications

• Deep AWS expertise including VPC, IAM, EC2, EKS, ELB, Route 53, S3, EBS and cost controls.
• Production Kubernetes at scale with cluster upgrades, CNI, CoreDNS, autoscalers like Karpenter, and debugging at 3 a.m.
• Terraform mastery across many accounts, managing state and large refactors without production impact.
• Strong networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, routing).
• You write real code in Python, Go, or Rust for automation, tooling, and controllers.
• Observability with Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana; turning metrics/logs/traces into meaningful SLOs/alerts.
• Track record of leading production incidents and durable root-cause fixes.
• You own problems end-to-end and thrive when the path forward isn't laid out.

Responsibilities

• Own production at scale: manage compute, networking, and storage foundation behind Perplexity's products and ensure availability, latency, and cost.
• Run our Kubernetes fleet: operate and upgrade EKS clusters, tune scheduling, autoscaling, DNS, and service networking under bursty loads.
• Engineer the network: design VPCs, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, load balancing, DNS and cross-account connectivity.
• Keep data durable and fast: oversee storage (EBS, S3, DynamoDB) and databases/backups with tested recovery.
• Manage everything as code: IaC with Terraform and CI/CD; create reusable modules and safe rollback guardrails.
• Prepare for failures: define SLOs, build actionable alerts, design for regional failures, and run game days.
• Lead incident response: drive incidents to resolution, write blameless postmortems, and implement durable fixes.
• Scale ahead of demand: capacity planning, quotas, reservations, and cost optimization for launches.
• Automate away toil: build self-serve tooling to reduce manual provisioning and remediation.

Job description

Perplexity is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to own compute, networking, and storage at scale. You will ensure availability, latency, and cost across consumer, computer, API, and enterprise products while the platform evolves rapidly.

You will run our Kubernetes fleet, design resilient VPCs, manage data stores, and drive infrastructure as code with Terraform and CI/CD. You will lead incident response, define SLOs, and run game days to prove recovery.