Staff Software Engineer, Connector Platform & Backend

Perplexity; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking an experienced backend-focused engineer to own the Connector Platform runtime, semantic layer design, and secure integration patterns. You will drive tool-discovery surfaces, strengthen reliability, and partner with product/AI teams to ensure scalable and accurate agent access to enterprise tools.

Role emphasizes building robust, secure connectors with observability, paging, and rate-limiting, while pushing for measurable quality across all integrations.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and building backend systems that run in production.
• Strong system design skills with a track record of scalable architectures.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language (Python, Go, or Rust).
• Hands-on experience with modern infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes).
• Depth in OAuth/authorization or API/connector development, or ML agent tooling is a plus.
• Comfort working in security-sensitive areas and balancing safety, simplicity, and velocity.
• Collaborative mindset and ability to solve hard, ambiguous problems with peers.

Responsibilities

• Own the design and implementation of the connector runtime and related hosting/execution layers.
• Develop the semantic layer including schemas, metadata, and knowledge integration.
• Design tool-discovery and tool-selection surfaces for agent calls.
• Ensure robustness with structured results, partial-failure handling, and observability.
• Define authentication, authorization, and credential isolation patterns with security teams.
• Build connector onboarding paths with schemas and evaluation suites to ensure quality.
• Establish SLAs, monitoring, and incident response for reliable, high-fan-out integrations.
• Collaborate with product and AI teams to define stable connector interfaces.

Job description

Perplexity is seeking an experienced backend-focused engineer to own the Connector Platform runtime, semantic layer design, and secure integration patterns. You will drive tool-discovery surfaces, strengthen reliability, and partner with product/AI teams to ensure scalable and accurate agent access to enterprise tools.

Role emphasizes building robust, secure connectors with observability, paging, and rate-limiting, while pushing for measurable quality across all integrations.