---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform) at Perplexity'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-api-platform-perplexity-san-jdzqqe9fwdmg'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-18'
---

# Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform) at Perplexity

- **Company:** [Perplexity](https://feeny.ai/companies/perplexity)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $220k–$405k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-08-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-18
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Perplexity/3f800e42-7c48-4f9a-9b12-43ee23e52516/application

**Skills:** Python, Go, Rust, AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, DevOps, API design, Schema evolution, Versioning, Idempotency, Authentication, Rate limiting, Performance tuning, AI APIs, Latency tuning, Streaming, Model orchestration

> Join the API Platform team to design, build, and scale mission-critical APIs and infrastructure. You will optimize performance, ensure security, and define technical strategy for high-traffic systems serving developers and agents.

## Job description

Perplexity API Platform Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration to serve the world's most discerning users. The Perplexity API Platform brings our technology to the world's most discerning developers. From exabyte-scale knowledge indexes to codegen-first agent runtimes, the building blocks behind Perplexity's applications are some of the most battle-tested AI systems in the industry. We believe these same building blocks can and should power the aspirations of builders everywhere. It's one thing to solve planet-scale retrieval, long-horizon orchestration, and other foundational AI challenges within a single product ecosystem. The true measure of success is to turn those solutions into elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike. Our API Platform delivers frontier intelligence to thousands of customers: startups, trillion-dollar enterprises, U.S. and allied governments, and everyone in between. We've achieved incredible scale, yet we're just getting started. Join us to build tools for curious minds.

## About this role

Perplexity is seeking strong engineers with a passion for delivering frontier intelligence and infrastructure to developers. Our company builds technology that reshapes how people search, reason, and interact with the world around them. Week after week, we observe increasing demand for programmatic interfaces to that technology. The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling these interfaces. As a member of our team, you'll work on an eclectic portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and frontier topics that often change with each passing month. Throughout this work, you'll prioritize great developer and agent experience alike. You'll also define technical strategy for how we scale to meet compounding growth exponentials (number of customers, agents per customer, compute/retrieval per agent, etc.).

## Key Responsibilities

- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
- Own and evolve the API gateway and routing layer: authentication, authorization, rate limiting and quotas, usage metering, and request routing across heterogeneous upstream services.
- Build the paved road for API services: standardized service scaffolding, container builds, CI/CD, Kubernetes and Helm deployment, and progressive rollouts with fast rollback, so a new API product goes from idea to production in days, not weeks.
- Build API governance into the platform: contract-first schemas, breaking-change detection in CI, versioning and deprecation workflows, and SDKs and documentation generated from a single source of truth.
- Unify cross-cutting capabilities (billing and usage, rate limiting, organization and identity settings, analytics and observability) so every API product gets them by default instead of rebuilding them.
- Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization (including on upstream systems).
- Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments, and operate what you build: SLOs, on-call, and incident response.
- Collaborate across teams to bring novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform, and partner with infrastructure teams on compute, networking, secrets, and security.
- Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today.
- Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.

## Qualifications

- 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: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
- Hands-on experience building and operating API gateways, reverse proxies, or routing layers: authentication and authorization, rate limiting and quotas, request routing, traffic shaping, and per-request observability.
- Experience building API governance tooling: contract-first API design, breaking-change detection and API linting in CI, versioning and deprecation workflows, and SDKs and documentation generated from the contract.
- Platform depth across the build and deploy path: you have owned CI/CD pipelines, container builds and base images, infrastructure as code, and progressive delivery (canary or blue-green) on a major cloud.
- A track record of owning a platform end to end: identifying the need, designing it, aligning the teams that depend on it, shipping it, and operating it, while raising the engineering bar for the teams building on it.
- Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike.

Strong plus:

- Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards).
- Usage-based billing and metering systems, multi-tenant organization and identity models, and usage analytics pipelines.
- Observability for API platforms: structured logging pipelines, metrics, tracing, and SLO tooling.

## 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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