Perplexity

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

Belgrade. Posted 20 months ago

The role

This person will own and improve the backend systems behind a latency-sensitive search stack. You will work across high-QPS Rust and Go services, distributed retrieval systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, and deployment tooling.

What you will do

  • 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.

Required qualifications

  • Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and automation.
  • Deep understanding of Linux internals, performance analysis, and production debugging.
  • Experience building or operating latency-sensitive, high-throughput backend systems.
  • Experience with containers, orchestration, observability, and infrastructure as code.
  • Experience building or maintaining CI/CD systems and release tooling.
  • Fluency in at least one systems language, such as Rust, Go, C++, or Java.
  • Comfort working across infrastructure and application-level code.
  • Strong ownership and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving environment.

Nice to have

  • Experience with search, retrieval, ranking, or other large-scale data-serving systems.
  • Experience operating Rust services in production.
  • Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and modern observability systems.
  • Experience with profiling, capacity planning, and performance optimization.
  • Experience building AI-assisted developer or operational tooling.

About the company

Perplexity is looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to own and improve the backend systems behind our latency-sensitive search stack.

Member of Technical Staff (Backend/Infrastructure Engineer, Search) at Perplexity | JobZoey