Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)

Join Perplexity, a company dedicated to reshaping how people search, reason, and interact with the world. As a Member of the Technical Staff, you'll be part of the API Platform engineering team, responsible for designing, implementing, and scaling programmatic interfaces. You'll work on a diverse range of topics, prioritize developer and agent experience, and define technical strategies for scaling. Your role will involve building mission-critical APIs, optimizing performance, enhancing system security and reliability, and collaborating across teams.

• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide customers with the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
• Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization, including on upstream systems.
• Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs.
• 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust
• Hands-on cloud experience (AWS preferred), along with fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices
• Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike
• Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards) is a strong plus
• Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning