Member of Technical Staff (Backend Software Engineer)

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.

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, GCP, 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