Site Reliability Engineer (AWS/Kubernetes)

Location: San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, or Remote (United States)

Salary: $220K–$405K USD annually, plus equity; international salaries are based on the local market.

Company

Perplexity operates AI-powered consumer, Computer, API, and enterprise products supported by large-scale production infrastructure.

What you will do

• Own the availability, latency, cost, and reliability of compute, networking, and storage infrastructure across a multi-account AWS estate.
• Operate and upgrade EKS clusters hosting web services, search, datastores, and secure sandboxes, including scheduling, autoscaling, node lifecycle, DNS, and service networking.
• Design and operate VPC architectures, Transit Gateway and PrivateLink connectivity, load balancing, DNS, and egress across accounts, regions, and cloud providers.
• Manage storage systems including EBS, S3, DynamoDB, managed databases, and caches, covering performance, durability, backups, and tested restores.
• Run infrastructure through Terraform and CI/CD, build reusable modules and guardrails, define SLOs and actionable alerts, and automate provisioning, upgrades, and remediation.
• Lead incident response, postmortems, capacity planning, disaster-recovery exercises, and reliability improvements for production systems.

Requirements

• Deep production AWS expertise, including VPC, IAM, EC2, EKS, ELB, Route 53, S3, EBS, service limits, failure modes, and cost management.
• Production Kubernetes experience at scale, including cluster upgrades, CNI, CoreDNS, autoscaling, Karpenter, and debugging misbehaving nodes.
• Advanced Terraform experience designing module structures, managing state across many accounts, and performing large refactors and imports safely.
• Strong networking fundamentals covering TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, and routing.
• Ability to write production code in Python, Go, or Rust for automation, tooling, and controllers.
• Fluency with observability tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana, with the ability to turn metrics, logs, and traces into meaningful SLOs and alerts.
• Experience leading production incidents and converting root-cause analysis into durable fixes.
• Ability to own problems end to end and work effectively when the path forward is not defined.

Nice to have

• Experience with multi-region active-active or failover architectures and disaster-recovery programs with defined recovery targets.
• Experience with proxies, service meshes, and kernel-level networking, including Envoy, Istio, Cilium, or eBPF.
• Experience with GitOps and progressive delivery using Argo CD, Flux, or similar tools.
• Experience in enterprise and compliance environments, including single-tenant or BYOC deployments, KMS/BYOK, and SOC 2 or similar controls.
• Experience running stateful systems such as Postgres, Redis, Vespa, or Elasticsearch in production.
• Experience operating multi-cloud or neocloud environments such as GCP or CoreWeave.
• FinOps experience with cost attribution, Savings Plans, reservations, and infrastructure cost optimization.

Culture & Benefits

• U.S. full-time employees receive equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care benefits.
• Employees outside the U.S. receive benefits tailored to their region of residence.
• Work is available from U.S. locations or remotely within the United States.
• Infrastructure work emphasizes blameless postmortems, tested recovery, safe rollbacks, and automation that reduces operational toil.