Member of Technical Staff; Backend Software Engineer, API Platform

Perplexity API Platform

Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration to serve the world's most discerning users. The Perplexity API Platform brings our technology to the world's most discerning developers.

From exabyte-scale knowledge indexes to codegen-first agent runtimes, the building blocks behind Perplexity's applications are some of the most battle-tested AI systems in the industry. We believe these same building blocks can and should power the aspirations of builders everywhere. It's one thing to solve planet-scale retrieval, long-horizon orchestration, and other foundational AI challenges within our own product ecosystem. The true measure of success is to turn those solutions into elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike.

Our API Platform delivers frontier intelligence to thousands of customers: startups, trillion-dollar enterprises, U.S. and allied governments, and everyone in between. We've achieved incredible scale, yet we're just getting started. Join us to build tools for curious minds.

Perplexity is seeking strong engineers with a passion for delivering frontier intelligence and infrastructure to developers. Our company builds technology that reshapes how people search, reason, and interact with the world around them. Week after week, we observe increasing demand for programmatic interfaces to that technology. The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling these interfaces.

As a member of our team, you'll work on an eclectic portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and frontier topics that often change with each passing month. Throughout this work, you'll prioritize great developer and agent experience alike. You'll also define technical strategy for how we scale to meet compounding growth exponentials (number of customers, agents per customer, compute/retrieval per agent, etc.).

• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs in Python, Go, or Rust optimized for low latency, high throughput, and strong consistency.
• Lead major technical initiatives, from new platform components to multi-team system redesigns.
• Improve system reliability and security by implementing rate limiting, authentication, observability (metrics, tracing, logging), and automated testing.
• Collaborate across teams to determine when to extend existing systems versus build new, specialized services.
• Translate customer needs into scalable platform capabilities and generalized API features.
• Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
• Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: versioning, schema evolution, idempotency, auth patterns, and performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience running AWS services, plus fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern Dev Ops practices.
• Experience with LLM or natural-language APIs (latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration) is a strong plus.
• Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt.

Compensation Range: $220K - $405K