Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)
at Perplexity
San Francisco; Seattle; New York City; Toronto, senior, full time, USD 2,20,000–4,05,000 / year, 5+ years
posted 31 Oct 2026
- API Design
- Rust
- Infrastructure as Code
- Go
- CI/CD
- Helm
- Distributed Systems
- Observability
- Python
- Kubernetes
About the role
Posted: 2026-10-31
PERPLEXITY API PLATFORM
Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration to serve the world's most discerning users. The Perplexity API Platform brings our technology to the world's most discerning developers. From exabyte-scale knowledge indexes to codegen-first agent runtimes, the building blocks behind Perplexity's applications are some of the most battle-tested AI systems in the industry.
We believe these same building blocks can and should power the aspirations of builders everywhere. It's one thing to solve planet-scale retrieval, long-horizon orchestration, and other foundational AI challenges within a single product ecosystem. The true measure of success is to turn those solutions into elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike. Our API Platform delivers frontier intelligence to thousands of customers: startups, trillion-dollar enterprises, U.S. and allied governments, and everyone in between.
We've achieved incredible scale, yet we're just getting started. Join us to build tools for curious minds.
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.).
What you would do
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
- Own and evolve the API gateway and routing layer: authentication, authorization, rate limiting and quotas, usage metering, and request routing across heterogeneous upstream services.
- Build the paved road for API services: standardized service scaffolding, container builds, CI/CD, Kubernetes and Helm deployment, and progressive rollouts with fast rollback, so a new API product goes from idea to production in days, not weeks.
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