{"id":320804,"url":"https://alion.io/job/perplexity-ai-member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-infrastructure","title":"Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Infrastructure & 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":78,"open_postings":34,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.882,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":56,"computed_at":"2026-11-06T05:58:05Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States","London, United Kingdom","Austin, United States","Berlin, Germany","Seattle, United States","New York, United States","Toronto, Canada"],"countries":["US","GB","DE","CA"],"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":4,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Perplexity","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-05T09:23:02Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-05","last_verified_at":"2026-11-06T17:32:04Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":62,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":62},"description":"About the Role\nThe Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational systems behind Perplexity’s products. At Perplexity, infrastructure sits on the critical path of every answer, supporting real-time search, retrieval, model serving, and agent workloads where latency, reliability, and rapid iteration directly shape the user experience. This role is for strong infrastructure engineers whose experience spans multiple domains and who are energized by cross-cutting problems that do not fit neatly within a single platform team.\nYou do not need to be a specialist in every area. Scope ranges from owning major production systems to setting technical direction across teams, leading complex infrastructure programs, and shaping infrastructure strategy across the organization. If a specialized Cloud Infrastructure, Storage Platform, Backend Platform, Data Platform, Connector Platform, or AI Acceleration role clearly matches your expertise and interests, apply directly to it. If your experience spans several infrastructure domains or you are most energized by cross-cutting systems problems, apply here. Submit one application, and we will consider you across the Infrastructure organization.\nKey Responsibilities\nOwn cross-cutting infrastructure problems that span compute, storage, networking, data, deployment, and reliability, including eliminating bottlenecks across retrieval and serving paths, building shared abstractions across deployment environments, and resolving failure modes that cross platform boundaries.\n\nDesign, build, and operate distributed infrastructure supporting Perplexity’s consumer, AI, and enterprise workloads, owning systems from architecture through production operation.\n\nIdentify gaps between existing platforms and build shared abstractions, automation, and tooling that make infrastructure easier and safer to use.\n\nImprove system performance, availability, scalability, and cost-efficiency across online request traffic and background workloads.\n\nDebug complex production issues across service and infrastructure boundaries, then turn the findings into durable architectural improvements.\n\nSet technical direction for complex infrastructure systems, lead high-impact programs across teams, and establish durable technical standards through collaboration with infrastructure, product, AI, and security partners.\n\nQualifications\n4+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend, platform, or distributed systems.\n\nA track record of owning complex production systems end to end and delivering sustained technical impact across teams.\n\nDemonstrated ability to set technical direction, lead through influence, and raise the engineering bar through architecture, design reviews, and mentorship.\n\nStrong software engineering skills in Python or other systems or backend languages such as Go, Rust, C++, or Java.\n\nMeaningful experience across at least two infrastructure domains, such as cloud platforms, distributed systems, Kubernetes, storage, databases, networking, data systems, developer infrastructure, or production reliability.\n\nAbility to develop depth quickly in unfamiliar systems, reason across software and infrastructure layers, and drive production incidents from diagnosis through durable resolution.\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":3441,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":4,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"Germany","iso":"DE","kind":"country"},{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"},{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["LLM & Generative AI","Search Engines","Foundation Models","AI Search"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-05T16:34:24Z"}],"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":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, 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