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Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Data Platform)

Perplexity· Platform & Infrastructure
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San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York City$220k - $405kFull-timePosted 4mo ago

About the role

Senior/staff data platform engineer shaping architecture and long-term technical direction for Perplexity’s data ecosystem, spanning ingestion, processing, storage, and serving with a self-serve data platform.

Responsibilities

  • Design and operate large-scale batch and streaming data pipelines that directly power Perplexity product features, AI training and evaluation workflows, analytics, and experimentation.
  • Build event-driven and streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, PubSub, or similar) for real-time ingestion, transformation, and delivery, alongside batch frameworks for backfills, aggregations, and offline computation.
  • 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.
  • Set and enforce guarantees for data correctness, freshness, lineage, and recoverability, designing systems that handle rapid scale growth, partial failures, and evolving schemas without disrupting AI workloads or product experiences.
  • Build self-serve data platforms that let engineers, data scientists, and analysts safely discover data, define contracts, and create and operate their own pipelines with minimal friction.
  • Improve developer experience through better abstractions, opinionated paved paths, and standards for data modeling, testing, validation, and deployment, treating the data platform as a product used by many teams.
  • 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.
  • Mentor engineers, review designs, and raise the technical bar for data infrastructure through thoughtful feedback, documentation, and hands-on collaboration.

Qualifications

  • 5+ years (Senior) or 8+ years (Staff) of software engineering experience.
  • Strong experience building production data infrastructure systems.
  • Hands-on experience with batch and/or streaming data processing at scale.
  • Deep familiarity with data orchestration systems (Airflow, Dagster, or similar).
  • Proficiency in Python and at least one additional backend language (Go, TypeScript, etc.).
  • Strong systems thinking around reliability, latency, cost, and complexity tradeoffs.
  • Experience supporting ML/AI workflows, training pipelines, or evaluation systems.
  • Familiarity with data quality, lineage, observability, and governance tooling.
  • Prior ownership of internal platforms used by many teams.

Skills

Required:Data pipeline designData orchestrationPythonBackend development
Nice to have:Data quality and observability

Benefits

  • Full-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.
  • International Benefits: Full-time employees outside the U.S. enjoy a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region of residence.
Last updated Aug 5, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Perplexity

ai-plg-top-20brex-fastest-growing-2025liquid-ai-recruiting-targetsetter-30setter-30-2026-q1
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