Senior Staff Software Engineer - Infrastructure

📋 Description

• • Perplexity is at the forefront of a paradigm shift in how individuals access and interact with information, and as a Senior Staff Software Engineer - Infrastructure, you will be instrumental in building the very foundation that powers this revolution. We are a lean, agile team dedicated to building state-of-the-art products, and your role will be pivotal in enabling our web, mobile, and browser engineering teams to achieve this vision.
• • You will be entrusted with the critical responsibility of leading the design, implementation, and scaling of the essential tools, systems, and platforms that form the backbone of Perplexity's innovative offerings. This is a unique opportunity to shape the infrastructure that empowers our product, AI, and developer teams, allowing them to innovate at an unprecedented pace while rigorously upholding the highest standards of reliability, security, and performance, even as we scale to meet global demand.
• • As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will not just be a coder; you will be a technical leader, a mentor, and a strategic thinker. You will dive deep into complex technical challenges, architecting robust and scalable solutions that anticipate future needs. Your contributions will directly impact the speed and quality of innovation across the entire organization, ensuring that every engineer at Perplexity can build with confidence on a solid, well-engineered platform.
• • Depending on your expertise and interest, you will contribute to one of our key infrastructure teams:
• • **Platform Team:** This team is the bedrock of Perplexity's product reliability, scalability, and performance. You will be responsible for building and maintaining critical backend systems, including robust authentication mechanisms, efficient real-time data flow pipelines, and sophisticated service orchestration. Furthermore, you will contribute to frontend frameworks that guarantee fast, dependable, and secure user experiences. By establishing and enforcing rigorous standards for code quality, uptime, and developer productivity, you will ensure that Perplexity can innovate rapidly on top of a resilient and expertly architected foundation.
• • **DevX (Developer Experience) Team:** This team is dedicated to empowering all Perplexity engineers to build, ship, and iterate with unparalleled speed and efficiency. You will own and evolve internal platforms for source control, build processes, testing frameworks, and deployment pipelines, systematically removing friction from every stage of product development. Your work will involve architecting seamless onboarding experiences, optimizing blazing-fast CI/CD systems, and developing advanced developer tools that unlock creativity and ensure safety at scale. Through deep collaboration and a high degree of autonomy, you will amplify the impact of every engineer, making rapid, reliable innovation a reality across the company.
• • **Cloud Infra Team:** This team is responsible for the architecture and operation of the mission-critical cloud infrastructure that underpins Perplexity's global platform. You will design and scale compute, storage, and networking systems to handle high-throughput, low-latency workloads. This role involves a dynamic blend of proactive project work focused on future-proofing our infrastructure and essential operational support to maintain peak performance. You will collaborate closely with product, AI research, security, and other Perplexity teams to ensure our services are consistently available, exceptionally reliable, and performant enough to meet the demands of user curiosity, building infrastructure that scales in lockstep with user growth and model advancements.
• • In all these roles, you will be expected to mentor junior engineers, conduct thorough code reviews, contribute to architectural discussions, and drive best practices across the engineering organization. You will have the opportunity to work with a modern tech stack including Python, Go, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, FastAPI, React, Bazel, GitHub, and AWS, continuously learning and adapting to new technologies.
• • This is more than just a job; it's a chance to be part of a company that is redefining the future of information access. You will be working with a passionate and talented team, tackling challenging problems, and making a tangible impact on a product used by millions worldwide. Your technical leadership and innovative solutions will be crucial in scaling Perplexity to new heights and ensuring we remain at the cutting edge of AI-powered search and interaction.