Backend/Infrastructure Engineer (Member of Technical Staff, Search)
Posted Updated
- Perplexity is looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to own and improve the backend systems behind our latency-sensitive search stack. You’ll work across high-QPS Rust and Go services, distributed retrieval systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, and deployment tooling
- This role combines infrastructure expertise with software engineering. You’ll take systems from design through production operation and use AI-native tools where they meaningfully improve engineering and operational workflows
- 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
- Comfort working across infrastructure and application-level code
- Experience building or maintaining CI/CD systems and release tooling
- Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and automation
- Deep understanding of Linux internals, performance analysis, and production debugging
- Experience with containers, orchestration, observability, and infrastructure as code
- Strong ownership and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving environment
- Experience building or operating latency-sensitive, high-throughput backend systems
- Fluency in at least one systems language, such as Rust, Go, C++, or Java
- 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 building AI-assisted developer or operational tooling
- Experience with profiling, capacity planning, and performance optimization