Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, API Platform)

San Francisco. Posted 14 days ago

The role

You will design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs and infrastructure. You will work on distributed systems, performance optimization, and agent orchestration to serve developers and agents.

What you will do

Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs.
Own and evolve the API gateway and routing layer.
Build the paved road for API services including CI/CD and Kubernetes deployment.
Build API governance into the platform.
Unify cross-cutting capabilities like billing, rate limiting, and observability.
Ensure low latency and high throughput through performance optimization.
Harden system security and reliability and handle on-call and incident response.
Collaborate across teams to bring frontier capabilities into the API Platform.
Reimagine customer needs and architectures.
Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews and code quality.

Required qualifications

5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
Significant time building platforms or infrastructure used by other engineering teams.
Strong understanding of high-traffic API design.
Hands-on experience building and operating API gateways, reverse proxies, or routing layers.
Experience building API governance tooling.
Platform depth across the build and deploy path including CI/CD, container builds, infrastructure as code, and progressive delivery on a major cloud.
A track record of owning a platform end to end.
Strong customer empathy and product sense.

Nice to have

Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards).
Usage-based billing and metering systems, multi-tenant organization and identity models, and usage analytics pipelines.
Observability for API platforms: structured logging pipelines, metrics, tracing, and SLO tooling.

About the company

Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration. The company builds technology that reshapes how people search, reason, and interact with the world.