Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Model Platform)

About Perplexity AI

In 2026, we launched Computer, the defining product for the new era of agentic AI. We’ve scaled beyond the millions of people using Perplexity every day for research, shopping, investing and curiosity into a new paradigm of using AI to transform knowledge into action.

As an engineer at Perplexity, your role will be to build products and systems that define how AI empowers humans to think, decide and act. You’ll ship fast and work between both product and infrastructure advancements in our technology.

About the Role

Perplexity is looking for a deeply technical software engineer to own and evolve our model serving platform, which is responsible for connecting our products and research systems with our inference layers. This mission-critical system gives teams one fast, reliable interface across providers.

You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, AI products, and infrastructure. You will make it dramatically easier for teams across Perplexity to adopt new models, run rigorous experiments, and ship dependable products.

The ideal candidate combines sound technical judgment forged in production systems with active curiosity around the rapidly changing capabilities and failure modes of frontier models. You will design core abstractions, lead high-conviction technical decisions, and write production Rust and Python for a service that serves hundreds of millions of model requests per day.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the model serving platform connecting products and research systems with inference layers.
• Design core abstractions and make high-conviction technical architecture decisions.
• Write production-grade Rust and Python serving hundreds of millions of requests per day.
• Enable cross-functional teams to adopt new frontier models, run experiments, and ship reliable products.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping large-scale systems and services with high reliability, availability, and performance.
• Strong software engineering craft, with special care for developer experience and designing future-proof systems that can evolve along with a rapidly advancing AI landscape.
• Proficiency with a general-purpose backend language (Python, Rust, C++, Go) and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes).
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or related fields (or equivalent experience).