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Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)

Backend Developer • On-site • Full-time • 📍 San Francisco

Design and scale mission-critical APIs on Perplexity's API Platform, delivering frontier AI intelligence and infrastructure to thousands of developers and enterprise customers.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build and operate mission-critical APIs providing building blocks for frontier intelligence
  • Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization
  • Continually reimagine architectures for tomorrow's customer needs while serving today's workloads
  • Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments
  • Collaborate across teams to bring novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform
  • Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality and documentation

Requirements

  • 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go or Rust
  • Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution/versioning, idempotency, auth patterns, rate limiting, performance tuning
  • Hands-on cloud experience (AWS preferred), fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD and modern DevOps practices
  • Strong customer empathy and product sense for ergonomic, well-documented APIs

Nice to have

  • Experience with modern AI APIs (latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards)

Soft skills

Customer empathyCross-team collaborationOwnership of critical systemsAttention to engineering quality

About the company

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine that combines multiple leading models with real-time web search to deliver fast, trustworthy, citation-backed answers. In 2026 it launched Computer, a general-purpose agentic AI product used by millions to turn knowledge into action.

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