Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Data Platform)

The role

You will shape architecture and drive the long-term technical direction of the data ecosystem. You will design and operate large-scale batch and streaming data pipelines to power product features, AI workloads, and analytics.

What you will do

• Design and operate large-scale batch and streaming data pipelines.
• Build event-driven and streaming systems for real-time ingestion and delivery.
• Lead the architecture of data orchestration using tools like Airflow or Dagster.
• Set and enforce guarantees for data correctness, freshness, lineage, and recoverability.
• Build self-serve data platforms for engineers, data scientists, and analysts.
• Improve developer experience through abstractions and standards.
• Drive architectural decisions across storage, compute, orchestration, and data APIs.
• Mentor engineers, review designs, and raise the technical bar.

Required 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.

About the company

The Data Platform team owns the end-to-end data lifecycle at Perplexity, from ingestion through processing, storage, and serving.