Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Storage Platform)
San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 3mo ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
RAG Engineer
About the job
The Storage Platform team is responsible for the infrastructure that enables Perplexity to persist, retrieve, and manage data across all systems. This team ensures high availability, performance, and cost-efficiency for all products and AI workloads. They manage the full spectrum of storage technologies, including relational databases, vector databases, custom storage solutions, and the associated tooling for provisioning, monitoring, and optimization at scale. By building robust abstractions and maintaining operational excellence in storage, the team allows other engineers to concentrate on product innovation, confident in the speed, reliability, and accessibility of their data.
Responsibilities
- Design, operate, and improve the storage platform for all Perplexity products and AI workloads, including relational, NoSQL, and vector databases.
- Own reliability, performance, and availability SLOs for stateful systems, including root cause analysis and long-term fixes for storage incidents.
- Define and evolve storage abstractions, APIs, and tooling for scalable storage consumption by product teams.
- Collaborate with AI, infra, and product teams to design data models and access patterns for low-latency, high-throughput, and cost-efficient requirements.
- Lead capacity planning, benchmarking, and lifecycle management for storage clusters, including scaling, migrations, and deprecations.
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend or infrastructure systems in production.
- Deep hands-on experience with at least one major database technology (e.g., Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, Cassandra) and familiarity with modern cloud storage services.
- Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization for high-throughput, low-latency workloads.
- Proven track record of owning services end-to-end, including design, implementation, deployment, and on-call.
- Proficiency in at least one backend programming language (e.g., Go, Rust, or Python).
- Effective communication and collaboration skills to partner with product, infra, and AI teams.