Staff API Platform Engineer: Frontier Intelligence

Perplexity; New York (NY); On-site; USD 220,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity in New York is seeking senior backend engineers to design, build, and operate API platforms that deliver frontier intelligence to developers and agents.

You will work on distributed systems, performance, and security across cloud environments, with a focus on low latency, scalability, and ergonomic APIs.

The role requires 5+ years in backend, strong Python/Go/Rust, AWS, Kubernetes, and CI/CD, plus a customer-first mindset.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience.
• Strong knowledge of API design, latency, and scalability.
• Experience with cloud and DevOps practices.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
• Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization (including on upstream systems).
• Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today.
• Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments.
• Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs.
• Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

Go

Rust

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Job description

Perplexity in New York is seeking senior backend engineers to design, build, and operate API platforms that deliver frontier intelligence to developers and agents.

You will work on distributed systems, performance, and security across cloud environments, with a focus on low latency, scalability, and ergonomic APIs.

The role requires 5+ years in backend, strong Python/Go/Rust, AWS, Kubernetes, and CI/CD, plus a customer-first mindset.