Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)

About this role

• 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 that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence
• Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization (including on upstream systems)
• Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today
• Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments
• Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs
• Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation- 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust
• Hands-on cloud experience (AWS preferred), along with fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices
• Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike
• Experience with modern AI A...