{"id":6259,"url":"https://alion.io/job/perplexity-ai-member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-data-platform","title":"Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Data Platform)","company":{"id":3,"name":"Perplexity AI","domain":"perplexity.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/perplexity","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":80,"open_postings":34,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.794,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":52,"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States","New York, United States","Palo Alto, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":220000,"max":405000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":405000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon Kinesis","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":false},{"name":"Dagster","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"dbt","optional":false},{"name":"Delta Lake","optional":false},{"name":"Flink","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Perplexity","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-03T15:09:34Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-03","last_verified_at":"2026-10-22T05:17:29Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":140,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":140},"description":"About the Role\nThe Data Platform team owns the end-to-end data lifecycle at Perplexity, from ingestion through processing, storage, and serving, powering product features, analytics, experimentation, AI workloads, and the company’s data lake.\nThe team defines the architecture for batch and streaming systems, the orchestration and observability stack, and a self-serve data platform, while thoughtfully combining platforms such as Databricks and Snowflake with open-source technologies including Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Dagster, dbt, Iceberg, Delta Lake, and ClickHouse.\nIn this senior/staff role, you will shape architecture, set standards, and drive the long-term technical direction of Perplexity’s data ecosystem.\nKey Responsibilities\nDesign and operate large-scale batch and streaming data pipelines that directly power Perplexity product features, AI training and evaluation workflows, analytics, and experimentation.\n\nBuild event-driven and streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, PubSub, or similar) for real-time ingestion, transformation, and delivery, alongside batch frameworks for backfills, aggregations, and offline computation.\n\nLead the architecture of data orchestration using tools like Airflow or Dagster, owning scheduling, dependency management, retries, SLAs, and end-to-end observability for critical data flows.\n\nSet and enforce guarantees for data correctness, freshness, lineage, and recoverability, designing systems that handle rapid scale growth, partial failures, and evolving schemas without disrupting AI workloads or product experiences.\n\nBuild self-serve data platforms that let engineers, data scientists, and analysts safely discover data, define contracts, and create and operate their own pipelines with minimal friction.\n\nImprove developer experience through better abstractions, opinionated paved paths, and standards for data modeling, testing, validation, and deployment, treating the data platform as a product used by many teams.\n\nDrive architectural decisions across storage, compute, orchestration, and data APIs, partnering closely with product engineering and data science to align the data ecosystem with Perplexity’s roadmap.\n\nMentor engineers, review designs, and raise the technical bar for data infrastructure through thoughtful feedback, documentation, and hands-on collaboration.\n\nQualifications\n5+ years (Senior) or 8+ years (Staff) of software engineering experience.\n\nStrong experience building production data infrastructure systems.\n\nHands-on experience with batch and/or streaming data processing at scale.\n\nDeep familiarity with data orchestration systems (Airflow, Dagster, or similar).\n\nProficiency in Python and at least one additional backend language (Go, TypeScript, etc.).\n\nStrong systems thinking around reliability, latency, cost, and complexity tradeoffs.\n\nExperience supporting ML/AI workflows, training pipelines, or evaluation systems.\n\nFamiliarity with data quality, lineage, observability, and governance tooling.\n\nPrior ownership of internal platforms used by many teams.\n\nIf you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3186,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["LLM & Generative AI","Search Engines","Foundation Models","AI Search"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-06-03T15:09:34Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 18","filings_12m":18,"filings_prev_12m":10,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":212500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":12}],"liveness":{"score":13,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.449,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":140,"expected_fill_days":52,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":405000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/perplexity-ai-member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-data-platform","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/perplexity-ai-member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-data-platform.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-22T07:17:55Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2886,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-23T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":3},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fperplexity-ai-member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-data-platform"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fperplexity-ai-member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-data-platform"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fperplexity-ai-member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-data-platform"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/perplexity-ai-member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-data-platform\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fperplexity-ai-member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-data-platform"}]}