About this rolePerplexity is seeking strong engineers with a passion for delivering frontier intelligence and infrastructure to developers. Our company builds technology that reshapes how people search, reason, and interact with the world around them. Week after week, we observe increasing demand for programmatic interfaces to that technology. The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling these interfaces.
As a member of our team, you'll work on an eclectic portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and frontier topics that often change with each passing month. Throughout this work, you'll prioritize great developer and agent experience alike. You'll also define technical strategy for how we scale to meet compounding growth exponentials (number of customers, agents per customer, compute/retrieval per agent, etc.).
Key Responsibilities- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
- Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization (including on upstream systems).
- Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today.
- Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments.
- Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs.
- Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.
Qualifications- 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
- Hands-on cloud experience (AWS preferred), along with fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices.
- Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards) is a strong plus.
- Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike.
