Staff Infrastructure Engineer: Lead Cross-Platform Systems

Engg; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity’s Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational systems behind its products. This role focuses on cross-cutting problems spanning compute, storage, networking, and reliability, owning major production systems and guiding architectural direction.

You will design, build, and operate distributed infrastructure for latency-sensitive workloads, relentlessly improve performance and cost-efficiency, and mentor teams to raise the engineering bar through reviews and standards

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend, platform, or distributed systems.
• A track record of owning complex production systems end to end and delivering sustained technical impact across teams.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, lead through influence, and raise the engineering bar through architecture, design reviews, and mentorship.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python or other systems or backend languages such as Go, Rust, C++, or Java.
• Meaningful experience across at least two infrastructure domains, such as cloud platforms, distributed systems, Kubernetes, storage, databases, networking, data systems, developer infrastructure, or production reliability.
• Ability to develop depth quickly in unfamiliar systems, reason across software and infrastructure layers, and drive production incidents from diagnosis through durable resolution.

Responsibilities

• Own cross-cutting infrastructure problems that span compute, storage, networking, data, deployment, and reliability, including eliminating bottlenecks across retrieval and serving paths, building shared abstractions across deployment environments, and resolving failure modes that cross platform boundaries.
• Design, build, and operate distributed infrastructure supporting Perplexity’s consumer, AI, and enterprise workloads, owning systems from architecture through production operation.
• Identify gaps between existing platforms and build shared abstractions, automation, and tooling that make infrastructure easier and safer to use.
• Improve system performance, availability, scalability, and cost-efficiency across online request traffic and background workloads.
• Debug complex production issues across service and infrastructure boundaries, then turn the findings into durable architectural improvements.
• Set technical direction for complex infrastructure systems, lead high-impact programs across teams, and establish durable technical standards through collaboration with infrastructure, product, AI, and security partners.

Skills

Python

Go

Rust

C++

Java

Job description

Perplexity’s Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational systems behind its products. This role focuses on cross-cutting problems spanning compute, storage, networking, and reliability, owning major production systems and guiding architectural direction.

You will design, build, and operate distributed infrastructure for latency-sensitive workloads, relentlessly improve performance and cost-efficiency, and mentor teams to raise the engineering bar through reviews and standards