Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)
San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 17d ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Infrastructure Engineer
About the job
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. The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling programmatic interfaces to that technology. 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, and define technical strategy for how we scale to meet compounding growth exponentials.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide customers with frontier intelligence building blocks.
- Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization.
- Reimagine customer needs and architectures for the future while serving current customer workloads.
- Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments.
- Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing ones.
- Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.
Requirements
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design, including schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
- Hands-on cloud experience (AWS preferred), with fluency in Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices.
- Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards) is a strong plus.
- Strong customer empathy and product sense to ensure APIs are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt.