Staff Data Platform Engineer: Large-Scale Pipelines & AI

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

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking a senior/staff data platform architect to shape the long-term direction of our data ecosystem. You will own end-to-end data pipelines, drive orchestration strategy, and help teams safely discover and deploy data products.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with product and data science, and push for strong observability and data quality. This role emphasizes scale, reliability, and ML/AI workflow support.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering for senior, 8+ for staff level.
• Proven track record building production data infra at scale.
• Experience with batch and streaming data processing.
• Strong knowledge of data orchestration tooling (Airflow/Dagster).

Responsibilities

• Design and operate large-scale batch and streaming pipelines powering product features, analytics, and AI workflows.
• Lead architecture of data orchestration and ensure end-to-end observability and reliability.
• Set standards for data correctness, freshness, lineage, and recoverability.
• Build self-serve data platforms enabling engineers and scientists to define pipelines safely.
• Mentor engineers, review designs, and raise the technical bar for data infrastructure.

Skills

Data platform design

Distributed systems

Python

Go/TypeScript

Data modeling

Observability

ML/AI workflows

Tools

Airflow

Dagster

Kafka

Kinesis

Pub/Sub

Databricks

Snowflake

Spark

dbt

Iceberg

Delta Lake

ClickHouse

Job description

Perplexity is seeking a senior/staff data platform architect to shape the long-term direction of our data ecosystem. You will own end-to-end data pipelines, drive orchestration strategy, and help teams safely discover and deploy data products.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with product and data science, and push for strong observability and data quality. This role emphasizes scale, reliability, and ML/AI workflow support.