---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, GPU Cluster Infrastructure) at Perplexity'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-gpu-cluster-infrastructure-aqp0j2cazq33'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-08'
---

# Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, GPU Cluster Infrastructure) at Perplexity

- **Company:** [Perplexity](https://feeny.ai/companies/perplexity)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $250k–$485k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-10-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Perplexity/886f4ab3-e691-45ed-b2db-069edf6f5413

## Job description

Perplexity serves hundreds of millions of queries a month, and every one of them fans out into multiple AI inference requests running in real time. Behind that sits a large GPU fleet spread across several cloud providers. Today, our inference engineers and researchers build models while also managing networking, securing capacity, and operating the underlying GPU clusters, responsibilities we want a dedicated platform team to own. Your job is to take ownership of that infrastructure and hide its complexity behind a unified, self-serve platform for running training and inference workloads.

## Responsibilities

- Build a self-serve compute platform. Design and own the systems that let inference engineers and researchers launch training jobs and operate inference services without managing GPU provisioning, cluster configuration, or provider-specific infrastructure.
- Operate the GPU fleet. Own provisioning, lifecycle management, reliability, and capacity integration across providers, giving teams a consistent way to use compute regardless of where it runs.
- Solve for GPU scarcity. Build the scheduling and placement logic that finds available capacity across providers, packs it efficiently, and gets the right workload onto the right hardware under real constraints.
- Support two very different workloads. Keep long-running distributed training jobs healthy while simultaneously guaranteeing the availability and latency of production inference services on the same fleet.
- Own the Kubernetes for GPU orchestration. Write the operators and CRDs, and manage many clusters across providers so the platform behaves the same everywhere we run.
- Make failure boring. Build the fault tolerance, autoscaling, and observability that keep the fleet utilized and let workloads survive node loss, provider hiccups, and capacity shifts without human intervention.
- Set technical direction across teams. Partner with inference and cloud infrastructure engineers to turn operational constraints into a coherent platform architecture and roadmap.

## Qualifications

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

- Deep Kubernetes experience — custom operators, CRDs, and multi-cluster federation, not just running kubectl apply.
- You've managed GPU clusters at scale: NVIDIA hardware, CUDA, and the networking that makes them fast (InfiniBand or RoCE).
- You've orchestrated compute across multiple clouds (CoreWeave, AWS, GCP, or similar) and understand how different each one really is.
- Strong distributed systems fundamentals: scheduling, resource allocation, and fault tolerance under load.
- You write infrastructure and systems-level code in Go, Rust or C++.
- You've supported both long-running training jobs and high-availability inference services, and you know why they pull infrastructure in opposite directions.
- You own problems end-to-end and do well when the path forward isn't laid out for you.

Additional experience we value

- Inference serving stacks: vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM.
- Slurm or other HPC schedulers.
- GPU kernel work in CUDA or Triton — not required, but notable.
- High-speed interconnects: InfiniBand, RoCE, or RDMA in production.
- Observability for ML workloads: Prometheus, Grafana, or Weights & Biases.

## 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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