Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)
Posted Updated
Description
- 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.)
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence
- Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization (including on upstream systems)
- Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today
- Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments
- Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs
- Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust, including significant time building platforms or infrastructure used by other engineering teams
- Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike
- 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