Staff Backend Engineer: Frontier AI API Platform

Perplexity; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity invites experienced backend engineers to join the API Platform in San Francisco. You will design, implement, and operate mission-critical APIs that enable frontier intelligence for developers and agents, with a focus on low latency and high throughput.

You will work across distributed systems, orchestration, and performance tuning, leveraging AWS, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD practices to scale as customers grow.

Qualifications

• 5+ years backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
• Experience designing high-traffic APIs with latency considerations.
• Cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and DevOps proficiency.

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.
• Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow while serving today’s workloads.
• Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments.
• Collaborate across teams to incorporate frontier capabilities into the API Platform.
• Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and documentation.

Skills

API design & distributed systems

Performance optimization

DevOps practices

Collaborative teamwork

Tools

Python

Go

Rust

Job description

Perplexity invites experienced backend engineers to join the API Platform in San Francisco. You will design, implement, and operate mission-critical APIs that enable frontier intelligence for developers and agents, with a focus on low latency and high throughput.

You will work across distributed systems, orchestration, and performance tuning, leveraging AWS, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD practices to scale as customers grow.