---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff (Site Reliability Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure) at Perplexity'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-site-reliability-engineer-cloud-infrastructure-9amheqr2gk81'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-08'
---

# Member of Technical Staff (Site Reliability Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure) at Perplexity

- **Company:** [Perplexity](https://feeny.ai/companies/perplexity)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $220k–$405k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-10-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Perplexity/5fe2b80d-9d59-42bb-90e6-9a0b78d7d403

## Job description

Perplexity serves hundreds of millions of queries a month. Every answer, every Perplexity Computer task, and every enterprise deployment runs on production infrastructure owned by the Cloud Infrastructure team: a fleet of Kubernetes clusters across a multi-account AWS estate, private networks that reach hyperscalers and the neoclouds serving our models, and the storage underneath our user data and agentic workloads. We're looking for SREs who treat reliability as a software problem. You'll own compute, networking, and storage at scale and keep production stable while everything built on top of it is changing fast.

## Responsibilities

- Own production at scale. Run the compute, networking, and storage foundation behind Perplexity's consumer, Computer, API, and enterprise products, and own its availability, latency, and cost.
- Run our Kubernetes fleet. Operate and upgrade the EKS clusters that host web services, search, datastores, and secure sandboxes. Tune scheduling, autoscaling, node lifecycle, DNS, and service networking so clusters stay healthy under bursty, fast-growing load.
- Engineer the network. Design and operate VPC architectures, Transit Gateway and PrivateLink connectivity, load balancing, DNS, and egress across accounts, regions, and cloud providers.
- Keep data durable and fast. Own the storage layer (EBS, S3, DynamoDB, and the managed databases and caches our services depend on), including performance, durability, backups, and restores that have actually been tested.
- Manage everything as code. Run infrastructure through Terraform and CI/CD. Build reusable modules and guardrails, and make every change reviewable, repeatable, and safe to roll back.
- Prepare for failures. Define SLOs, build alerts that someone can act on, design for zone and regional failure, and run game days and disaster-recovery exercises that prove recovery works.
- Lead incident response. Be on the critical path when things break. Drive incidents to resolution, write blameless postmortems, and land the fixes so the same failure never pages anyone twice.
- Scale ahead of demand. Own capacity planning, quotas, reservations, and cost efficiency so product launches and traffic spikes never wait on infrastructure.
- Automate away the toil. Build tooling, increasingly agent-driven, that turns provisioning, upgrades, and remediation into self-serve, hands-off workflows for every engineering team.

## Qualifications

We expect you to have real depth in most of these:

- Deep AWS expertise. You know VPC, IAM, EC2, EKS, ELB, Route 53, S3, EBS, etc. well past the console, including their limits, failure modes, and the bill that comes with them.
- Production Kubernetes at scale: cluster upgrades, CNI, CoreDNS, autoscalers like Karpenter, and debugging a misbehaving node at 3 a.m. Writing Helm charts alone doesn't count.
- Terraform mastery. You've designed module structures, managed state across many accounts, and run large refactors and imports without taking production down.
- Strong networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, routing).
- You write real code in Python, Go, or Rust for automation, tooling, and controllers, and you'd rather automate a runbook than follow it.
- Fluency with observability tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana, and the judgment to turn metrics, logs, and traces into SLOs and alerts that matter.
- A track record of leading production incidents and turning root-cause analysis into durable fixes.
- You own problems end-to-end and do well when the path forward isn't laid out for you.

Additional experience we value

- Multi-region active-active or failover architectures, and disaster-recovery programs with real recovery targets.
- Proxies, service meshes, and kernel-level networking: Envoy, Istio, Cilium, or eBPF.
- GitOps and progressive delivery: Argo CD, Flux, or similar.
- Enterprise and compliance environments: single-tenant or BYOC deployments, KMS/BYOK, SOC 2 or similar controls.
- Running stateful systems in production: Postgres, Redis, or search engines like Vespa or Elasticsearch.
- Multi-cloud or neocloud operations (GCP, CoreWeave, or similar).
- FinOps: cost attribution, Savings Plans and reservations, and making infrastructure cheaper without making it fragile.

## About Perplexity

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Perplexity builds an AI-powered answer engine that delivers accurate, real-time answers to any question, serving curious minds and professionals who demand precision and speed.
- **Entity Type**: Private (total funding $1.7B across 16 rounds)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, Andy Konwinski

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI-powered search and knowledge retrieval, Software Development
- **Target customers**: B2C (general users), B2B (enterprise API customers), and power users seeking reliable information
- **Mission**: “AI for people who expect more – more accuracy, more agency, more signal, less noise.”

## Products & Services
- **Perplexity AI (Free Tier)**: Real-time conversational search engine that synthesizes web results with citations, accessible via web and mobile app. *Type*: SaaS
- **Perplexity Pro**: Subscription offering enhanced features such as advanced AI models, multimodal search, and increased usage limits. *Type*: SaaS (subscription)
- **Perplexity API Platform**: Enables developers to integrate Perplexity’s search and reasoning capabilities into their own applications. *Type*: API
- **Perplexity Browser Extension**: Brings AI-powered search directly into the browser for quick answers without leaving the page. *Type*: Browser extension

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available in provided sources (prior reports indicate ~$9B valuation as of 2024, but not confirmed in this data set)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $1.7B (16 rounds); annual revenue ~$50M (LinkedIn estimate)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not explicitly listed in provided search results; widely known investors include IVP, NEA, Jeff Bezos, and others (not sourced here)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 11.3% YoY to 1,152 employees; operates in 54 countries; LinkedIn followers grew 131.8% yearly to >1.6M; active hiring across 48+ open roles including AI Research, Engineering, and Go-to-Market teams

## Competitive Advantages
- **Real-time, cited answers**: Unlike traditional chatbots, Perplexity grounds answers in live web results with transparent sources, building trust and accuracy.
- **Multimodal and agentic capabilities**: Continuously pushes frontier research (e.g., query-aware context compression, agents for knowledge work) that differentiates from generic LLM interfaces.
- **Vertical integration from research to product**: In-house AI research team tackles open problems unique to Perplexity’s scale, enabling fast iteration on novel methods.
- **Strong brand and user base**: Rapid consumer adoption with millions of monthly active users and high engagement.

## Strategic Focus
- **Pushing the frontier of search**: Evolving from retrieval services to code generation, agents, and full autonomy in knowledge work.
- **Expanding enterprise and API revenue**: Growing B2B footprint with API platform and enterprise solutions.
- **Global hiring and office expansion**: Offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, Austin, Washington D.C., London, Berlin, and Belgrade, with “4 days in office” hybrid model.
- **Investing in AI research**: Dedicated research division (Perplexity Research) exploring reasoning, agents, and systems to redefine how people navigate the internet.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Environment**: “Thoughtful support” culture with emphasis on craftsmanship, ownership, entrepreneurship, scholarship, and partnership. Hybrid schedule (4 days in-office) based on location.
- **Perks**: Daily catered meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner in office), office snacks, ride home program, commuter benefits, home office reimbursement, fitness classes, gym memberships.
- **Compensation & Benefits**: Competitive salary and equity packages; retirement plans with company match; flexible PTO; holiday shutdown between Christmas and New Year; 12 weeks paid bonding leave; comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
- **Relocation & Visa Support**: Relocation assistance and visa/green card sponsorship for eligible roles. Partners with immigration firm to support the process.
- **Engineering Excellence**: “Technical assessment for relevant roles”; values hands-on contribution, broad skill sets, and merit-based evaluation. Frequent Tech Talks and exposure to greenfield AI research problems.

## Sources
1. [perplexity.ai/hub/careers](https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/careers)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity)
3. [perplexity.ai](https://www.perplexity.ai/)
4. [linkedin.com/company/perplexity-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/perplexity-ai)
5. [research.perplexity.ai](https://research.perplexity.ai/)

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