Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Monetization)
Posted Updated
- As a monetization engineer at Perplexity, you’ll own the abstractions that let product teams ship new SKUs, run pricing experiments, and convert users into paying customers, without needing to understand billing internals
- The usage-based billing system this team owns is foundational to Perplexity Computer and our agentic products: metering every agent action in real time, enforcing credit budgets, and settling costs across entirely new interaction models
- You’ll work across subscriptions, usage-based billing, and enterprise contracts to ensure every revenue path is reliable, observable, and easy to extend
- Tech Stack: Python | Go | Stripe | PostgreSQL | AWS | Docker
- Design, build, and own the billing platform and monetization systems that power Computer and every paid experience across Perplexity
- Lead features end-to-end, from problem definition through technical design, implementation, and launch, including the billing API abstractions that let product teams ship new SKUs, pricing models, and monetization experiments with minimal friction
- Build and operate the subscription, invoicing, and usage-based billing systems that serve millions of users across consumer and enterprise plans
- Hill-climb on reliability: tiered SLOs organized by customer impact, proactive monitoring, and alerting to catch revenue-affecting issues before customers do
- Partner closely with Finance, Data Science, Growth, Security, Support, and go-to-market teams to keep billing data accurate, auditable, and compliant, and to expand payment method coverage and optimize authorization rates globally
- Build internal tooling that empowers Support and Finance to diagnose and resolve billing issues quickly
- Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and making data-informed decisions to prioritize work
- Demonstrated experience and appetite for building in-house billing solutions that rival leading best-in-class buy options
- Strong product judgment, you translate user and stakeholder problems into simple, effective technical solutions
- Self-motivated with strong ownership instincts, you ship major features ahead of schedule and drive improvements without asking for permission
- Deep familiarity with payment processors (Stripe, Square, etc.), including subscriptions, invoicing, disputes, refunds, and webhooks
- Direct experience building or scaling billing, payments, subscription, or monetization systems
- Track record of cross-functional collaboration with Finance, Support, or Growth stakeholders
- Strong backend engineering skills in Python with the ability to reason about complex distributed systems
- Genuine interest and adoption of AI products and willingness to learn quickly
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience
- 2+ years of hands-on experience with the Stripe APIs and SDKs
- Experience with usage-based or metered billing models, especially metering agent actions, tokens, or other non-traditional units
- Experience with Apple and Google Play in-app purchase billing
- Familiarity with growth experimentation and PLG/self-serve SaaS monetization
- Experience building platform constructs that support pricing experiments and A/B testing
- Full-stack experience (our frontend is Next.js/React/TypeScript)
- Experience in a regulatory or compliance-heavy billing environment
- Time spent at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team