$220K – $405K • Offers Equity

U.S. Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.

International Benefits

Full-time employees outside the U.S. enjoy a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region of residence.

USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions. International salaries are set based on the local market. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

About the Role

The Backend Platform team is the backbone of Perplexity’s product reliability, scalability, and performance, enabling every product and AI team to build with confidence.

This high‑impact group builds and maintains critical infrastructure, including backend systems for authentication, authorization, real-time data flows, service orchestration, and sandboxing, to ensure fast, reliable, and secure user experiences. By setting rigorous standards for code quality, uptime and performance, the Platform team ensures everyone at Perplexity can innovate at speed on top of a robust, well-architected foundation.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of our sandboxing platform to safely execute untrusted and user‑generated code while meeting strict performance and reliability requirements.

• Define and extend our RBAC and authorization primitives, ensuring they scale with new product capabilities and enterprise controls.

• Own key backend services involved in authentication and encryption flows (including BYOK‑related pieces), partnering with Security and Infra on defense‑in‑depth.

• Set the technical bar for backend platform design and operations, driving best practices in reliability, observability, and incident response for always‑on systems.

• Partner with product and AI teams to define clear platform interfaces, SLAs, and integration patterns so new features can reliably build on shared backend capabilities.

• Provide technical leadership across the backend platform area, mentoring other engineers and making long‑term architectural decisions that keep the foundation simple, secure, and evolvable.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and building backend systems that run in production (typically 4+ years for mid-level, more for senior and staff).

• Strong system design skills, with a track record of creating efficient, reliable, and scalable architectures.

• Hands-on experience with modern infrastructure (for example AWS, Kubernetes, and related cloud technologies).

• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, or Rust, and the ability to work effectively in a multi-language environment.

• Collaborative mindset and eagerness to solve challenging technical problems with other experienced engineers.

• Comfort working in security‑sensitive areas (auth, authorization, encryption) and making pragmatic trade-offs between safety, simplicity, and velocity.

If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above.

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$220K – $405K • Offers Equity

About the Role

The Data Platform team owns the end-to-end data lifecycle at Perplexity, from ingestion through processing, storage, and serving, powering product features, analytics, experimentation, AI workloads, and the company’s data lake. The team defines the architecture for batch and streaming systems, the orchestration and observability stack, and a self-serve data platform, while thoughtfully combining platforms such as Databricks and Snowflake with open-source technologies including Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Dagster, dbt, Iceberg, Delta Lake, and ClickHouse.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and operate large-scale batch and streaming data pipelines that directly power Perplexity product features, AI training and evaluation workflows, analytics, and experimentation.
• Build event-driven and streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, PubSub, or similar) for real-time ingestion, transformation, and delivery, alongside batch frameworks for backfills, aggregations, and offline computation.
• Lead the architecture of data orchestration using tools like Airflow or Dagster, owning scheduling, dependency management, retries, SLAs, and end-to-end observability for critical data flows.
• Set and enforce guarantees for data correctness, freshness, lineage, and recoverability, designing systems that handle rapid scale growth, partial failures, and evolving schemas without disrupting AI workloads or product experiences.
• Build self-serve data platforms that let engineers, data scientists, and analysts safely discover data, define contracts, and create and operate their own pipelines with minimal friction.
• Improve developer experience through better abstractions, opinionated paved paths, and standards for data modeling, testing, validation, and deployment, treating the data platform as a product used by many teams.
• Drive architectural decisions across storage, compute, orchestration, and data APIs, partnering closely with product engineering and data science to align the data ecosystem with Perplexity’s roadmap.
• Mentor engineers, review designs, and raise the technical bar for data infrastructure through thoughtful feedback, documentation, and hands-on collaboration.

Qualifications

• 5+ years (Senior) or 8+ years (Staff) of software engineering experience.
• Strong experience building production data infrastructure systems.
• Hands-on experience with batch and/or streaming data processing at scale.
• Deep familiarity with data orchestration systems (Airflow, Dagster, or similar).
• Proficiency in Python and at least one additional backend language (Go, TypeScript, etc.).
• Strong systems thinking around reliability, latency, cost, and complexity tradeoffs.
• Experience supporting ML/AI workflows, training pipelines, or evaluation systems.
• Familiarity with data quality, lineage, observability, and governance tooling.
• Prior ownership of internal platforms used by many teams.

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As an engineer at Perplexity, your role will be to build products and systems that define how AI empowers humans to think, decide and act. You'll ship fast and work between product, infrastructure and frontier level advancements in technology.

Design, build, and own product and platform systems for Computer Lead features, projects and products end-to-end, from problem definition to technical design, implementation, and launch. Hill climb on hard problems, continuously iterating to improve for ourselves and customers. Partner closely with engineers, product managers, designers, data scientists, and go-to-market teams. Build systems that take into account the nuances of AI, working with agents, context, evaluation, personalization and the ground truth.

Qualifications: 4+ years of professional software engineering experience. Strong experience in at least one general-purpose programming language such as Python, Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, Swift, Rust, Java, or C++. Experience building and operating production systems at a meaningful scale. Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions. Genuine interest and adoption of AI products and willingness to learn quickly.

Nice to have: Experience with LLMs, agents, retrieval systems, personalization, or evaluation frameworks. Time spent at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team. Founded a company or initiative.

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