Staff Engineer, Storage Platform & Data Infrastructure

Perplexity; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity in Palo Alto is hiring a Storage Platform Engineer to design, operate, and continuously improve the storage platform powering all products and AI workloads. You will own the storage stack across relational, NoSQL, and vector databases, ensuring high availability, performance, and cost efficiency.

You will lead reliability, performance, and capacity initiatives, define robust abstractions and tooling, and collaborate with AI, infra, and product teams to meet strict latency and

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend or infrastructure systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with at least one major database technology and cloud storage services.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization.

Responsibilities

• Design, operate, and improve the storage platform that underpins all Perplexity products and AI workloads.
• Own reliability, performance, and availability SLOs for stateful systems with root cause analysis.
• Define and evolve storage abstractions, APIs, and tooling for safe large-scale consumption.
• Partner with AI, infra, and product teams on data models and access patterns for low latency.
• Lead capacity planning, benchmarking, and lifecycle management for storage clusters.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend design

Performance optimization

Cross-team collaboration

Programming (Go/Python/Rust)

Tools

Postgres

MySQL

DynamoDB

Cassandra

Job description

Perplexity in Palo Alto is hiring a Storage Platform Engineer to design, operate, and continuously improve the storage platform powering all products and AI workloads. You will own the storage stack across relational, NoSQL, and vector databases, ensuring high availability, performance, and cost efficiency.

You will lead reliability, performance, and capacity initiatives, define robust abstractions and tooling, and collaborate with AI, infra, and product teams to meet strict latency and