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Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)

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

About the role

Senior backend-focused role building and operating the Perplexity API Platform. Responsible for designing, implementing, and scaling APIs, API gateways, governance tooling, and performance/ reliability improvements to deliver frontier intelligence APIs for developers and agents.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
  • Own and evolve the API gateway and routing layer: authentication, authorization, rate limiting and quotas, usage metering, and request routing across heterogeneous upstream services.
  • Build the paved road for API services: standardized service scaffolding, container builds, CI/CD, Kubernetes and Helm deployment, and progressive rollouts with fast rollback, so a new API product goes from idea to production in days, not weeks.
  • Build API governance into the platform: contract-first schemas, breaking-change detection in CI, versioning and deprecation workflows, and SDKs and documentation generated from a single source of truth.
  • Unify cross-cutting capabilities (billing and usage, rate limiting, organization and identity settings, analytics and observability) so every API product gets them by default instead of rebuilding them.
  • Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization (including on upstream systems).
  • Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments, and operate what you build: SLOs, on-call, and incident response.
  • Collaborate across teams to bring novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform, and partner with infrastructure teams on compute, networking, secrets, and security.
  • Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today.
  • Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust, including significant time building platforms or infrastructure used by other engineering teams.
  • Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
  • Hands-on experience building and operating API gateways, reverse proxies, or routing layers: authentication and authorization, rate limiting and quotas, request routing, traffic shaping, and per-request observability.
  • Experience building API governance tooling: contract-first API design, breaking-change detection and API linting in CI, versioning and deprecation workflows, and SDKs and documentation generated from the contract.
  • Platform depth across the build and deploy path: you have owned CI/CD pipelines, container builds and base images, infrastructure as code, and progressive delivery (canary or blue-green) on a major cloud.
  • A track record of owning a platform end to end: identifying the need, designing it, aligning the teams that depend on it, shipping it, and operating it, while raising the engineering bar for the teams building on it.
  • Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike.

Benefits

  • Full-time U.S. benefits including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.
  • International benefits tailored to region of residence.
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Perplexity

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Company profileWebsite

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