Member of Technical Staff (Backend/Infrastructure Engineer, Search)

Perplexity is looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to own and improve the backend systems behind our latency-sensitive search stack. You'll work across high-QPS Rust and Go services, distributed retrieval systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, and deployment tooling.

What you'll do

• Build and operate scalable, low-latency infrastructure for search serving and retrieval.
• Design and improve distributed backend systems that handle high request volumes.
• Debug and optimize Linux systems, containers, networking, and production services.
• Improve reliability through observability, capacity planning, performance profiling, and incident response.
• Design, deploy, and operate cloud-native systems, primarily on AWS and Kubernetes.
• Build internal tools and automation for development, testing, debugging, and infrastructure operations.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines, release processes, and production rollout safety.
• Own systems end to end, from architecture and implementation to deployment and production operation.

What you'll need

• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and automation.
• Deep understanding of Linux internals, performance analysis, and production debugging.
• Experience building or operating latency-sensitive, high-throughput backend systems.
• Experience with containers, orchestration, observability, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience building or maintaining CI/CD systems and release tooling.
• Fluency in at least one systems language, such as Rust, Go, C++, or Java.
• Comfort working across infrastructure and application-level code.
• Strong ownership and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving environment.

Nice to have

• Experience with search, retrieval, ranking, or other large-scale data-serving systems.
• Experience operating Rust services in production.
• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and modern observability systems.
• Experience with profiling, capacity planning, and performance optimization.