Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Storage Platform) at Perplexity (San Francisco, CA)
Perplexity· San Francisco, CA· $220k–$405k·
Role details
Equity
Perplexity at a glance
AI-powered answer engine that returns real-time, cited answers, now expanding into an agentic browser and on-device agents.
Perplexity runs an AI answer engine that searches the live web and returns direct, cited answers instead of a page of links. It has extended that core into an AI browser (Comet), an on-device agent (Computer), a developer API, and vertical tools like patent search.
$1.7B raised · latest: Series E extension · $200M · 2025 (reported $20B valuation) · backed by Accel, IVP, NEA, SoftBank Vision Fund 2
Summary
Design, operate, and improve the storage platform powering Perplexity's products and AI workloads. Own reliability and performance SLOs for stateful systems, define storage abstractions, and partner with cross-functional teams to ensure data accessibility and efficiency.
Job description
About the Role
The Storage Platform team owns the infrastructure that powers how Perplexity persists, retrieves, and manages data across all systems, ensuring high availability, performance, and cost-efficiency for every product and AI workload.
This foundational, high-impact group is responsible for the full spectrum of storage technologies – relational databases, vector databases, custom storage implementations, and the tooling to provision, monitor, and optimize them at scale.
By building robust abstractions and operational excellence around storage, the team enables engineers across Perplexity to focus on product innovation while trusting that data is fast, reliable, and always accessible.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design, operate, and continuously improve the storage platform that underpins all Perplexity products and AI workloads, including relational, NoSQL, and vector databases.
- Own reliability, performance, and availability SLOs for stateful systems, driving root cause analysis and long‑term fixes for storage‑related incidents.
- Define and evolve opinionated storage abstractions, APIs, and tooling that make it simple and safe for product teams to consume storage at scale.
- Partner with AI, infra, and product teams to design data models and access patterns that meet low‑latency, high‑throughput, and cost‑efficiency requirements.
- Lead capacity planning, benchmarking, and lifecycle management for storage clusters, including scaling, migrations, and deprecations.
QUALIFICATIONS
- 5+ years of experience building and operating large‑scale backend or infrastructure systems in production.
- Deep hands‑on experience with at least one major database technology (for example, Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, Cassandra) and familiarity with modern cloud storage services.
- Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization for high‑throughput, low‑latency workloads.
- Proven track record of owning services end‑to‑end, including design, implementation, deployment, and on‑call.
- Proficiency in at least one programming language used for backend systems (such as Go, Rust, or Python).
- Effective communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner closely with product, infra, and AI teams.
If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above.
Why work at Perplexity
- 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.