Member of Technical Staff (Backend/Infrastructure Engineer, Search)
Posted by employer 1 year ago
First seen on Joblaze 5 months ago
Last verified on the company career page 15 hours ago
Not disclosed in this posting: compensation, years of experience, work arrangement, visa sponsorship.
Joblaze summary
In this role, the Infrastructure Engineer at Perplexity is responsible for building and maintaining scalable infrastructure that supports high-performance search systems. The position requires expertise in cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS, along with strong skills in Linux, Python, and at least one systems programming language. This opportunity is well-suited for someone with a solid background in systems design and automation, who is eager to contribute to both infrastructure and application-level code. Perplexity's small team environment fosters innovation and a hands-on approach to developing cutting-edge search technologies.
Joblaze insights
- Listed about 5 months ago on Joblaze — tracked directly from Perplexity's career page.
- Perplexity has 116 other open roles including Senior Cinematographer, Brand Studio, Member of Technical Staff (Applied AI Engineer, Agent Capabilities), Strategic Business Operations Lead, API.
- 6619 active Python roles on Joblaze right now.
- 2757 active AWS roles on Joblaze right now.
- 1997 active Go roles on Joblaze right now.
- Typical Python salary we track runs $125,000–$190,800 (median $160,000, across 3271 roles). See Python salary trends
Quick facts
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: AWS, Go, Linux, Python.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Perplexity targets senior candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Member of Technical Staff (Backend/Infrastructure Engineer, Search) role at Perplexity.
From the original posting
Perplexity is looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to own and improve the backend systems behind our latency-sensitive search stack. You’ll work across high-QPS Rust and Go services, distributed retrieval systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, and deployment tooling.
This role combines infrastructure expertise with software engineering. You’ll take systems from design through production operation and use AI-native tools where they meaningfully improve engineering and operational workflows
Responsibilities
Build and operate scalable, low-latency infrastructure for search serving and retrieval.
Design and improve distributed backend systems that handle high request volumes.
Debug and optimize Linux systems, containers, networking, and production services.
Improve reliability through observability, capacity planning, performance profiling, and incident response.
Design, deploy, and operate cloud-native systems, primarily on AWS and Kubernetes.
Build internal tools and automation for development, testing, debugging, and infrastructure operations.
Improve CI/CD pipelines, release processes, and production rollout safety.
Contribute directly to product codebases across Rust, Go, and other systems languages.
Own systems end to end, from architecture and implementation to deployment and production operation.
Requirements
Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and automation.
Deep understanding of Linux internals, performance analysis, and production debugging.
Experience building or operating latency-sensitive, high-throughput backend systems.
Experience with containers, orchestration, observability, and infrastructure as code.
Experience building or maintaining CI/CD systems and release tooling.
Fluency in at least one systems language, such as Rust, Go, C++, or Java.
Comfort working across infrastructure and application-level code.
Strong ownership and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving environment.
Nice To Have
Experience with search, retrieval, ranking, or other large-scale data-serving systems.
Experience operating Rust services in production.
Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and modern observability systems.
Experience with profiling, capacity planning, and performance optimization.
Experience building AI-assisted developer or operational tooling.