Staff AI Systems Engineer - Scalable Model Serving

Perplexity; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity AI seeks a deeply technical software engineer to own and evolve our model serving platform, connecting products and research systems with inference layers. This mission-critical system provides a fast, reliable interface across providers.

You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, AI products, and infrastructure, enabling teams to adopt new models, run rigorous experiments, and ship dependable products.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping large-scale systems and services with high reliability, availability, and performance.
• Strong software engineering craft, with care for developer experience and future-proof systems.
• Proficiency with a general-purpose backend language (Python, Rust, C++, Go) and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes).
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or related fields (or equivalent experience).

Responsibilities

• Design core abstractions for the model serving platform.
• Lead high-conviction technical decisions and ship production-grade services.
• Collaborate with product and infra teams to support hundreds of millions of model requests per day.

Skills

Distributed systems

Production Rust/Python

Backend development

Cloud infrastructure

System design

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related

Tools

Rust

Python

C++

Go

AWS

Kubernetes

Job description

Perplexity AI seeks a deeply technical software engineer to own and evolve our model serving platform, connecting products and research systems with inference layers. This mission-critical system provides a fast, reliable interface across providers.

You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, AI products, and infrastructure, enabling teams to adopt new models, run rigorous experiments, and ship dependable products.