Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)

About the role

The Perplexity API Platform is designed to bring frontier intelligence to thousands of customers, including startups, trillion-dollar enterprises, and U.S. and allied governments. This role involves designing, building, and operating mission-critical APIs that provide customers with the building blocks for frontier intelligence.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
• Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
• Hands-on cloud experience (AWS preferred), along with fluency with 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, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike.

Pay

$220K - $405K