Member of Technical Staff (General Software Engineer, Infrastructure)

The Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational systems behind Perplexity's products. This role is for strong infrastructure engineers whose experience spans multiple domains and who are energized by cross-cutting problems that do not fit neatly within a single platform team. Scope ranges from owning major production systems to setting technical direction across teams, leading complex infrastructure programs, and shaping infrastructure strategy across the organization.

What you'll do

• Own cross-cutting infrastructure problems that span compute, storage, networking, data, deployment, and reliability, including eliminating bottlenecks across retrieval and serving paths, building shared abstractions across deployment environments, and resolving failure modes that cross platform boundaries.
• Design, build, and operate distributed infrastructure supporting Perplexity's consumer, AI, and enterprise workloads, owning systems from architecture through production operation.
• Identify gaps between existing platforms and build shared abstractions, automation, and tooling that make infrastructure easier and safer to use.
• Improve system performance, availability, scalability, and cost-efficiency across online request traffic and background workloads.
• Debug complex production issues across service and infrastructure boundaries, then turn the findings into durable architectural improvements.
• Set technical direction for complex infrastructure systems, lead high-impact programs across teams, and establish durable technical standards through collaboration with infrastructure, product, AI, and security partners.

What you'll need

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend, platform, or distributed systems.
• A track record of owning complex production systems end to end and delivering sustained technical impact across teams.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, lead through influence, and raise the engineering bar through architecture, design reviews, and mentorship.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python or other systems or backend languages such as Go, Rust, C++, or Java.
• Meaningful experience across at least two infrastructure domains, such as cloud platforms, distributed systems, Kubernetes, storage, databases, networking, data systems, developer infrastructure, or production reliability.
• Ability to develop depth quickly in unfamiliar systems, reason across software and infrastructure layers, and drive production incidents from diagnosis through durable resolution.