As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will shape the technical foundation of Perplexity's external platform. You'll architect distributed systems, optimize performance at scale, and set engineering standards that ensure our APIs are fast, resilient, and a delight to build on.
What you'll do
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs in Python, Go, or Rust optimized for low latency, high throughput, and strong consistency.
- Lead major technical initiatives, from new platform components to multi-team system redesigns.
- Improve system reliability and security by implementing rate limiting, authentication, observability (metrics, tracing, logging), and automated testing.
- Collaborate across teams to determine when to extend existing systems versus build new, specialized services.
- Translate customer needs into scalable platform capabilities and generalized API features.
- Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.
What you need
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: versioning, schema evolution, idempotency, auth patterns, and performance tuning.
- Hands-on experience running AWS services, plus fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices.
- Experience with LLM or natural-language APIs (latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration) is a strong plus.
- Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt.
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