Backend Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Backend Engineer (AI) (Python/Go/Rust): Designing and scaling mission-critical APIs to deliver frontier intelligence to developers with an accent on performance optimization and distributed systems. Focus on building high-throughput interfaces, optimizing latency, and ensuring system reliability for a rapidly growing customer base.

Location: San Francisco or New York City

Compensation: $220K – $405K + Equity

Company

Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration to serve the world's most discerning users.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
• Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization across systems.
• Architect and scale interfaces to meet exponential growth in customers, agents, and compute requirements.
• Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments.
• Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier AI capabilities into the API Platform.
• Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
• Strong understanding of high-traffic API design, including schema evolution, idempotency, and rate limiting.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices.
• Strong customer empathy and product sense to ensure APIs are ergonomic and easy to adopt.

Nice to have

• Experience with modern AI APIs, including latency tuning, streaming, and model orchestration.
• Familiarity with emerging technical standards for AI agents.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive US benefits including health, dental, vision, and retirement accounts.
• Equity packages.
• Fitness, commuter, and dependent care accounts.
• Opportunity to work on battle-tested AI systems and planet-scale retrieval challenges.
• Tailored benefit programs for employees based outside the U.S.