Staff Software Engineer: AI Acceleration & Platforms

Perplexity; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity AI is seeking an experienced engineer for its Acceleration team. You will work at the intersection of AI product development, infrastructure, and developer experience to push velocity and reliability across the company.

The ideal candidate brings 5–15+ years in infrastructure/platform engineering, daily use of advanced AI tools, and a hands-on mindset to build prototypes and production systems that scale with the business. This is a hybrid role in a fast-growing company.

Qualifications

• 5 to 15+ years of infra/platform engineering or developer acceleration experience.
• Daily use of AI models/tools and practical intuition for AI frontiers.
• Strong Python proficiency; interest in Rust, TypeScript, Go.
• Empathy for engineering and business teams and cross-discipline collaboration.
• Knowledge of common AI product stacks and cloud infrastructure.
• Ability to balance shipping now with building future capacity.

Responsibilities

• Identify and prioritize opportunities to accelerate delivery with frontier AI capabilities.
• Collaborate across engineering, product, and ops to harness AI in new ways.
• Make codebases and knowledge stores legible to AI systems.
• Extend the quality-velocity frontier while expanding it with AI tools.
• Keep up with new AI tools/models and set an example for the company.

Skills

Python

Rust

TypeScript

Go

AI tooling / LLMs

System design

Tools

CUDA knowledge

PyTorch

APIs & microservices

Job description

Perplexity AI is seeking an experienced engineer for its Acceleration team. You will work at the intersection of AI product development, infrastructure, and developer experience to push velocity and reliability across the company.

The ideal candidate brings 5–15+ years in infrastructure/platform engineering, daily use of advanced AI tools, and a hands-on mindset to build prototypes and production systems that scale with the business. This is a hybrid role in a fast-growing company.