Search Senior Backend Infrastructure Engineer

📋 Description

• • Join Perplexity as a Senior Backend Infrastructure Engineer and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of how people search and interact with information online. In this highly impactful position, you will be instrumental in building and maintaining the core systems that power our revolutionary search products and streamline our development workflows. This is a unique opportunity to blend deep infrastructure expertise with robust software engineering skills, taking ownership of critical systems that ensure the high quality and scalability of our offerings.
• • As a Senior Backend Infrastructure Engineer, your primary responsibility will be to architect, build, and maintain highly robust, scalable, and performant infrastructure. This infrastructure is the backbone of our high-performance search systems, designed to handle massive amounts of data and user traffic with exceptional speed and reliability. You will be at the forefront of ensuring our systems can grow seamlessly to meet increasing demand.
• • You will be a key player in developing and enhancing internal tools and automation. The goal is to significantly streamline developer workflows, reduce manual operational overhead, and boost overall operational efficiency. This involves identifying bottlenecks, creating elegant solutions, and implementing automation that empowers our engineering teams to focus on innovation and product development.
• • A significant part of your role will involve the design, deployment, and ongoing operation of cloud-native systems, with a strong emphasis on AWS. You will leverage your expertise to build resilient, cost-effective, and secure cloud environments, ensuring optimal performance and availability of our services.
• • You will be responsible for improving and supporting our CI/CD pipelines, testing infrastructure, and release processes. This includes optimizing build times, enhancing testing strategies, and ensuring smooth, reliable deployments. Your work will directly impact the speed and quality of our software releases.
• • Debugging and optimizing Linux systems, containers (such as Docker and Kubernetes), and backend services will be a core part of your daily activities. You will dive deep into system performance, identify root causes of issues, and implement solutions to ensure maximum efficiency and stability.
• • Beyond pure infrastructure, you will contribute directly to our product codebases. This cross-functional aspect means you'll be working across multiple languages, including Python and Go, and potentially other systems languages, to integrate infrastructure improvements and develop new features that leverage our robust backend.
• • You will be expected to champion best practices in infrastructure management, security, and operational excellence. This includes implementing monitoring, alerting, and logging solutions to provide deep visibility into system health and performance.
• • Collaborate closely with product engineering teams to understand their needs and translate them into scalable infrastructure solutions. You will act as a bridge between development and operations, fostering a culture of shared responsibility.
• • Proactively identify areas for improvement in our existing infrastructure, tooling, and processes. This involves staying abreast of the latest technologies and trends in cloud computing, containerization, and distributed systems.
• • Mentor junior engineers and share your knowledge, contributing to the overall growth and technical expertise of the team.
• • Participate in on-call rotations to ensure the continuous availability and performance of our critical systems, responding to incidents and performing root cause analysis.
• • Contribute to capacity planning and cost optimization efforts, ensuring our infrastructure scales efficiently and economically.
• • Develop and maintain comprehensive documentation for infrastructure, systems, and processes, ensuring knowledge transfer and maintainability.
• • You will be a key contributor to Perplexity's mission of revolutionizing information access, ensuring the underlying technology is robust, scalable, and cutting-edge. Your work will have a direct and tangible impact on millions of users worldwide.