Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Data Platform)

Join Perplexity as a Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer) in the Data Platform team. You will shape the architecture, set standards, and drive the long-term technical direction of Perplexity's data ecosystem. Your responsibilities will include designing and operating large-scale batch and streaming data pipelines, leading the architecture of data orchestration, building self-serve data platforms, and driving architectural decisions across storage, compute, orchestration, and data APIs. You will also mentor engineers, review designs, and raise the technical bar for data infrastructure.

• Design and operate large-scale batch and streaming data pipelines that directly power Perplexity product features, AI training and evaluation workflows, analytics, and experimentation.
• Lead the architecture of data orchestration using tools like Airflow or Dagster, owning scheduling, dependency management, retries, SLAs, and end-to-end observability for critical data flows.
• Drive architectural decisions across storage, compute, orchestration, and data APIs, partnering closely with product engineering and data science to align the data ecosystem with Perplexity’s roadmap.
• Familiarity with data quality, lineage, observability, and governance tooling
• Hands-on experience with batch and/or streaming data processing at scale
• Proficiency in Python and at least one additional backend language (Go, TypeScript, etc.)
• Deep familiarity with data orchestration systems (Airflow, Dagster, or similar)
• 5+ years (Senior) or 8+ years (Staff) of software engineering experience
• Prior ownership of internal platforms used by many teams
• Strong systems thinking around reliability, latency, cost, and complexity tradeoffs
• Experience supporting ML/AI workflows, training pipelines, or evaluation systems
• Strong experience building production data infrastructure systems
• If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above