What are the responsibilities and job description for the Member of Technical Staff (Backend Software Engineer) position at Perplexity AI?
Perplexity is looking for experienced Backend Engineers to build the foundational systems behind our core products. As we move toward agentic products that can reason, delegate, use tools, and execute complex workflows, backend engineering is one of the most important parts of making that experience reliable at scale. You'll help design and operate the systems that connect models, data, product surfaces, and infrastructure into a platform millions of people and companies can depend on.
We're hiring across several backend teams, and we'll match you with a specific group after you complete the interview process, factoring in both your background and what you're excited to work on. This lets us place engineers where their skills and interests line up with the highest-impact backend product work and the strongest opportunities for growth.
Teams Hiring
Cloud Infrastructure
The Cloud Infrastructure team owns the foundational cloud primitives and deployment models that power Perplexity's products, from multi-tenant public cloud to single-tenant and on-premises solutions for enterprise customers. As Perplexity expands into Computer and Enterprise offerings, this team is critical to delivering the security, isolation, and compliance controls that enterprise companies require, while maintaining the reliability and efficiency engineers depend on across all environments. By architecting flexible deployment topologies, multi-region support, and robust low-level infrastructure, the Cloud Infrastructure team enables Perplexity to scale from millions of consumer users to the world's largest organizations with confidence.
Storage Platform
The Storage Platform team owns the infrastructure that powers how Perplexity persists, retrieves, and manages data across all systems, ensuring high availability, performance, and cost-efficiency for every product and AI workload. This foundational, high-impact group is responsible for the full spectrum of storage technologies - relational databases, vector databases, custom storage implementations, and the tooling to provision, monitor, and optimize them at scale. By building robust abstractions and operational excellence around storage, the team enables engineers across Perplexity to focus on product innovation while trusting that data is fast, reliable, and always accessible.
Backend Platform
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 small, 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 developer productivity, the Platform team ensures everyone at Perplexity can innovate at speed on top of a robust, well-architected foundation.
Data Platform
The Data Platform team owns the end-to-end flow for how data is ingested, processed, stored, and served across Perplexity, enabling product features, analytics, experimentation, AI workloads, and the company's data lake. This is a highly technical, high-leverage team responsible for shaping the architecture of our batch and streaming systems, orchestration and observability stack, and self-serve data platform, while making thoughtful use of external platforms like Databricks and Snowflake alongside open-source technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Dagster, dbt, Iceberg, Delta Lake, and ClickHouse. Experience building data products or contributing to open-source data infrastructure is a strong plus.
Developer Experience
DevX (Developer Experience) team empowers engineers across Perplexity to build, ship, and iterate faster than ever. The team owns internal platforms for source control, build, test, and deployment - removing friction from every step of product development. They architect seamless onboarding, fast CI/CD, and developer tools that unlock creativity and safety at scale. Through deep collaboration and high autonomy, the DevX team amplifies the impact of every engineer, making rapid, reliable innovation possible across the company.
You Might Be a Good Fit If You
We're hiring across several backend teams, and we'll match you with a specific group after you complete the interview process, factoring in both your background and what you're excited to work on. This lets us place engineers where their skills and interests line up with the highest-impact backend product work and the strongest opportunities for growth.
Teams Hiring
Cloud Infrastructure
The Cloud Infrastructure team owns the foundational cloud primitives and deployment models that power Perplexity's products, from multi-tenant public cloud to single-tenant and on-premises solutions for enterprise customers. As Perplexity expands into Computer and Enterprise offerings, this team is critical to delivering the security, isolation, and compliance controls that enterprise companies require, while maintaining the reliability and efficiency engineers depend on across all environments. By architecting flexible deployment topologies, multi-region support, and robust low-level infrastructure, the Cloud Infrastructure team enables Perplexity to scale from millions of consumer users to the world's largest organizations with confidence.
Storage Platform
The Storage Platform team owns the infrastructure that powers how Perplexity persists, retrieves, and manages data across all systems, ensuring high availability, performance, and cost-efficiency for every product and AI workload. This foundational, high-impact group is responsible for the full spectrum of storage technologies - relational databases, vector databases, custom storage implementations, and the tooling to provision, monitor, and optimize them at scale. By building robust abstractions and operational excellence around storage, the team enables engineers across Perplexity to focus on product innovation while trusting that data is fast, reliable, and always accessible.
Backend Platform
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 small, 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 developer productivity, the Platform team ensures everyone at Perplexity can innovate at speed on top of a robust, well-architected foundation.
Data Platform
The Data Platform team owns the end-to-end flow for how data is ingested, processed, stored, and served across Perplexity, enabling product features, analytics, experimentation, AI workloads, and the company's data lake. This is a highly technical, high-leverage team responsible for shaping the architecture of our batch and streaming systems, orchestration and observability stack, and self-serve data platform, while making thoughtful use of external platforms like Databricks and Snowflake alongside open-source technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Dagster, dbt, Iceberg, Delta Lake, and ClickHouse. Experience building data products or contributing to open-source data infrastructure is a strong plus.
Developer Experience
DevX (Developer Experience) team empowers engineers across Perplexity to build, ship, and iterate faster than ever. The team owns internal platforms for source control, build, test, and deployment - removing friction from every step of product development. They architect seamless onboarding, fast CI/CD, and developer tools that unlock creativity and safety at scale. Through deep collaboration and high autonomy, the DevX team amplifies the impact of every engineer, making rapid, reliable innovation possible across the company.
You Might Be a Good Fit If You
- Have strong backend engineering fundamentals with experience building scalable, distributed systems in production
- Have deep hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure), databases (relational and NoSQL), caching systems, and observability tooling
- Are proficient in Python or similar backend languages (Go, Rust, Java) and comfortable picking up new technologies as needed
- Thrive in environments where requirements evolve quickly and enjoy working closely with product managers, AI researchers, and cross-functional teams to ship high-impact features
- Have worked with large-scale data systems, streaming pipelines, or orchestration platforms, and understand the tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and cost
- Care deeply about code quality, system design, and operational excellence, and take ownership of what you build from design through deployment and beyond
- Have 4 years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping meaningful backend systems that serve real users at scale
Salary : $220,000 - $405,000