Staff Backend Engineer - Real-Time Fraud Prevention

Perplexity; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking a software engineer to own backend services for fraud prevention. You will design, build, and operate high-throughput systems, collaborate with ML engineers, fraud analysts, and product teams, and ensure low-latency, reliable production deployments across sign-up, payments, and API usage.

You will work with Rust/Go/C++, Kubernetes, and Terraform, focusing on real-time data pipelines, feature computation, and seamless integration into product workflows.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and operating high-throughput, latency-sensitive backend systems in production.
• Experience with Rust, Go, or C++ (Rust preferred).
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform and cloud infrastructure.
• Solid data fundamentals: stream/batch computations, caching, and storage trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate high-throughput, low-latency backend services for fraud detection and prevention.
• Build data pipelines and real-time feature computation powering detections and ML models.
• Collect and process trust signals.
• Integrate fraud decisions into product, auth, and payments flows across the company.
• Own reliability of production services: observability, alerting, safe rollouts, incident response.
• Build internal tooling for investigation, enforcement, and auditability.
• Partner with fraud analysts to turn new abuse patterns into production detections quickly.

Skills

Latency-sensitive systems

Ownership mindset

Strong debugging

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP)

Job description

Perplexity is seeking a software engineer to own backend services for fraud prevention. You will design, build, and operate high-throughput systems, collaborate with ML engineers, fraud analysts, and product teams, and ensure low-latency, reliable production deployments across sign-up, payments, and API usage.

You will work with Rust/Go/C++, Kubernetes, and Terraform, focusing on real-time data pipelines, feature computation, and seamless integration into product workflows.