Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Infrastructure)

The Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational systems behind Perplexity’s products. At Perplexity, infrastructure sits on the critical path of every answer, supporting real-time search, retrieval, model serving, and agent workloads where latency, reliability, and rapid iteration directly shape the user experience. This role is for strong infrastructure engineers whose experience spans multiple domains and who are energized by cross-cutting problems that do not fit neatly within a single platform team.

You do not need to be a specialist in every area. Scope ranges from owning major production systems to setting technical direction across teams, leading complex infrastructure programs, and shaping infrastructure strategy across the organization. If a specialized Cloud Infrastructure, Storage Platform, Backend Platform, Data Platform, Connector Platform, or AI Acceleration role clearly matches your expertise and interests, apply directly to it. If your experience spans several infrastructure domains or you are most energized by cross-cutting systems problems, apply here. Submit one application, and we will consider you across the Infrastructure organization.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own cross-cutting infrastructure problems that span compute, storage, networking, data, deployment, and reliability, including eliminating bottlenecks across retrieval and serving paths, building shared abstractions across deployment environments, and resolving failure modes that cross platform boundaries.

• Design, build, and operate distributed infrastructure supporting Perplexity’s consumer, AI, and enterprise workloads, owning systems from architecture through production operation.

• Identify gaps between existing platforms and build shared abstractions, automation, and tooling that make infrastructure easier and safer to use.

• Improve system performance, availability, scalability, and cost-efficiency across online request traffic and background workloads.

• Debug complex production issues across service and infrastructure boundaries, then turn the findings into durable architectural improvements.