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

Responsibilities & Context

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.

This role combines infrastructure expertise with software engineering. You’ll take systems from design through production operation and use AI-native tools where they meaningfully improve engineering and operational workflows

Key Responsibilities

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.
Contribute directly to product codebases across Rust, Go, and other systems languages.
Own systems end to end, from architecture and implementation to deployment and production operation.