Perplexity
Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)
$220K–$405K
San Francisco +3 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 31, 2026
- Location
- San Francisco
Seattle
New York City
Toronto - Experience
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience.
About the job
Designs, builds, and operates the API platform that makes Perplexity’s AI capabilities available to developers, with a focus on scale, performance, governance, and developer experience.
What you'll do
- Build and operate mission-critical APIs, including the gateway and routing layer for authentication, quotas, metering, and upstream services.
- Develop standardized service build, deployment, and API governance workflows, including CI/CD, progressive rollouts, contract-first schemas, and generated SDKs and documentation.
- Optimize performance and operate secure, reliable services, including SLOs, on-call, and incident response.
What they ask for
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust, including significant time building platforms or infrastructure used by other engineering teams.
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design and hands-on experience building and operating API gateways, reverse proxies, or routing layers.
- Experience building API governance tooling and owning CI/CD, container builds and base images, infrastructure as code, and progressive delivery on a major cloud.
- Track record of owning a platform end to end, with strong customer empathy and product sense.
Nice to have
- Experience with modern AI APIs, including latency tuning, streaming, and model orchestration.
- Experience with usage-based billing and metering, multi-tenant identity, usage analytics, or API observability.
Pay
$220K – $405K USD base salary
Tools
Python, Go, Rust, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Helm
AI focus
Builds APIs and infrastructure that deliver frontier AI capabilities, including agent orchestration and modern AI API support.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative