Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Backend Platform)
Get alerts for roles like this
More Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Backend Platform) roles in San Francisco — straight to your inbox. No account needed.
Applying to this role? Tailor your résumé to this job description in one click, then download it clean — no watermark, no subscription.
Job Description
About Perplexity AI Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine built to serve the world’s curiosity with fast, trustworthy answers grounded in the live web and backed by clear citations.
It combines multiple leading models with real-time search to synthesize up-to-date, source-linked responses instead of traditional search results.
On top of this foundation, Perplexity is rolling out Computer, a general-purpose AI worker that can use software like a human to research, build, and execute end-to-end workflows for users.
About the Role
The Backend Platform team is the backbone of Perplexity’s product reliability, scalability, and performance, enabling every product and AI team to build with confidence.
This high‑impact group builds and maintains critical infrastructure, including backend systems for authentication, authorization, real-time data flows, service orchestration, and sandboxing, to ensure fast, reliable, and secure user experiences.
By setting rigorous standards for code quality, uptime and performance, the Platform team ensures everyone at Perplexity can innovate at speed on top of a robust, well-architected foundation.
Key Responsibilities
Lead the design and implementation of our sandboxing platform to safely execute untrusted and user‑generated code while meeting strict performance and reliability requirements. Define and extend our RBAC and authorization primitives, ensuring they scale with new product capabilities and enterprise controls.
Own key backend services involved in authentication and encryption flows (including BYOK‑related pieces), partnering with Security and Infra on defense‑in‑depth.
Set the technical bar for backend platform design and operations, driving best practices in reliability, observability, and incident response for always‑on systems.
Partner with product and AI teams to define clear platform interfaces, SLAs, and integration patterns so new features can reliably build on shared backend capabilities. Provide technical leadership
Required Skills
Similar Jobs
Other open roles matched to this job's skills and location.
Prepare to Win This Role
Everything you need to ace the interview and negotiate top-of-band compensation.