Joblaze summary

In this role, the engineer focuses on optimizing and maintaining the performance of crawler services, ensuring operational reliability and efficient resource management. Key skills include expertise in Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and programming in languages like Python or Go, alongside a solid understanding of networking and observability tools. This position is ideal for seasoned professionals with over five years of experience in site reliability or production engineering, particularly those familiar with distributed systems. The team emphasizes a culture of continuous improvement through blameless postmortems and robust incident response.

Joblaze insights

Listed today — first seen on Joblaze November 14, 2026. Last confirmed on Perplexity AI's careers page November 14, 2026.

Quick facts

How much experience is required?: At least 5 years of relevant experience for this Member of Technical Staff (Site Reliability Engineer, Crawler) role.
What's the tech stack?: Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: C++, Datadog, Go, Grafana, Kubernetes, Prometheus.
What seniority level is this role?: Perplexity AI targets senior candidates for this position.
Is this full-time or contract?: Full-time for this Member of Technical Staff (Site Reliability Engineer, Crawler) role at Perplexity AI.

From the original posting

Keeping a crawler running is not the same as keeping it productive. Queues can grow while servers look healthy, and a small change can become a fleet-wide bottleneck. On Perplexity's Crawler team, you'll improve throughput, plan capacity, and build operational reliability through safer deployments, better observability, and durable fixes.

Responsibilities

Operate and optimize Kubernetes workloads and supporting infrastructure for crawler services, including fetching and rendering fleets.
Build and maintain infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines, with safe rollouts, validation, and fast rollback.
Define SLOs and build monitoring, alerting, and observability for availability, latency, throughput, and resource saturation.
Own capacity planning and resource efficiency; diagnose queue backlogs, network failures, and resource bottlenecks with service owners.
Participate in the team's on-call rotation, lead incident response, and turn blameless postmortems into durable reliability improvements.
Write production software to automate diagnosis and routine remediation, with validation and approval gates for high-impact actions.

Qualifications

5+ years of experience in SRE, production engineering, or infrastructure-heavy backend roles, with strong programming skills in Python, C++, Rust, or Go.
Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, production Kubernetes, infrastructure as code such as Terraform, and automated deployment workflows.
Strong Linux and networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, HTTP, and load balancing.
Experience building observability with tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana, and using SLOs to guide reliability improvements.
Proven experience diagnosing distributed-system failures, leading production incidents, and improving system performance or resource efficiency.

Nice to have

Experience operating web crawlers, search infrastructure, or browser fleets at scale.
Experience with distributed queues, backpressure, workload isolation, or multi-region recovery.

Member of Technical Staff (Site Reliability Engineer, Crawler)

Similar positions