Member of Technical Staff - Backend/Infrastructure Engineer, Search

About the role

Perplexity is looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to own and improve the backend systems behind its latency-sensitive search stack. The role spans high-QPS Rust and Go services, distributed retrieval systems, cloud infrastructure, observability and deployment tooling, combining infrastructure expertise with software engineering. It takes systems from design through production operation and uses AI-native tools where they meaningfully improve engineering and operational workflows.

Key responsibilities

• Build and operate scalable, low-latency infrastructure for search serving and retrieval.
• Design and improve distributed backend systems handling 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 profile

• 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.
• Fluency in at least one systems language such as Rust, Go, C++ or Java.
• Comfortable working across infrastructure and application-level code.
• Strong ownership and ability to operate in a fast-moving environment.

Required skills

• Containers, orchestration, observability and infrastructure as code.
• CI/CD systems and release tooling.
• Nice to have: search, retrieval and ranking systems; production Rust services; AWS, Kubernetes and modern observability; profiling, capacity planning and performance optimization; AI-assisted developer or operational tooling.