Member of Technical Staff (Backend Software Engineer)

Perplexity is looking for experienced Backend Engineers to build the foundational systems behind our core products. As we move toward agentic products that can reason, delegate, use tools, and execute complex workflows, backend engineering is one of the most important parts of making that experience reliable at scale. You’ll help design and operate the systems that connect models, data, product surfaces, and infrastructure into a platform millions of people and companies can depend on.

We’re hiring across several backend teams, and we’ll match you with a specific group after you complete the interview process, factoring in both your background and what you’re excited to work on. This lets us place engineers where their skills and interests line up with the highest-impact backend product work and the strongest opportunities for growth.

Teams Hiring

Cloud Infrastructure

The Cloud Infrastructure team owns the foundational cloud primitives and deployment models that power Perplexity's products, from multi-tenant public cloud to single-tenant and on-premises solutions for enterprise customers. As Perplexity expands into Computer and Enterprise offerings, this team is critical to delivering the security, isolation, and compliance controls that enterprise companies require, while maintaining the reliability and efficiency engineers depend on across all environments. By architecting flexible deployment topologies, multi-region support, and robust low-level infrastructure, the Cloud Infrastructure team enables Perplexity to scale from millions of consumer users to the world's largest organizations with confidence.

Storage Platform

The Storage Platform team owns the infrastructure that powers how Perplexity persists, retrieves, and manages data across all systems, ensuring high availability, performance, and cost-efficiency for every product and AI workload. This foundational, high-impact group is responsible for the full spectrum of storage technologies – relational databases, vector databases, custom storage implementations, and the tooling to provision, monitor, and optimize them at scale. By building robust abstractions and operational excellence around storage, the team enables engineers across Perplexity to focus on product innovation while trusting that data is fast, reliable, and always accessible.

Backend Platform

The Backend Platform team is the backbone of Perplexity’s product reliability, scalability, and performance, enabling every product and AI team to build with confidence. This small, high-impact group builds and maintains critical infrastructure, including backend systems for authentication, authorization, real-time data flows, service orchestration, and sandboxing, to ensure fast, reliable, and secure user experiences. By setting rigorous standards for code quality, uptime, and developer productivity, the Platform team ensures everyone at Perplexity can innovate at speed on top of a robust, well-architected foundation.

Data Platform

The Data Platform team owns the end‑to‑end flow for how data is ingested, processed, stored, and served across Perplexity, enabling product features, analytics, experimentation, AI workloads, and the company’s data lake. This is a highly technical, high-leverage team responsible for shaping the architecture of our batch and streaming systems, orchestration and observability stack, and self-serve data platform, while making thoughtful use of external platforms like Databricks and Snowflake alongside open-source technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Dagster, dbt, Iceberg, Delta Lake, and ClickHouse. Experience building data products or contributing to open-source data infrastructure is a strong plus.

You Might Be a Good Fit If You

  • Have strong backend engineering fundamentals with experience building scalable, distributed systems in production

  • Have deep hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), databases (relational and NoSQL), caching systems, and observability tooling

  • Are proficient in Python or similar backend languages (Go, Rust, Java) and comfortable picking up new technologies as needed

  • Thrive in environments where requirements evolve quickly and enjoy working closely with product managers, AI researchers, and cross-functional teams to ship high-impact features

  • Have worked with large-scale data systems, streaming pipelines, or orchestration platforms, and understand the tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and cost

  • Care deeply about code quality, system design, and operational excellence, and take ownership of what you build from design through deployment and beyond

  • Have 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping meaningful backend systems that serve real users at scale

Back to blog

Common Interview Questions And Answers

1. HOW DO YOU PLAN YOUR DAY?

This is what this question poses: When do you focus and start working seriously? What are the hours you work optimally? Are you a night owl? A morning bird? Remote teams can be made up of people working on different shifts and around the world, so you won't necessarily be stuck in the 9-5 schedule if it's not for you...

2. HOW DO YOU USE THE DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION TOOLS IN DIFFERENT SITUATIONS?

When you're working on a remote team, there's no way to chat in the hallway between meetings or catch up on the latest project during an office carpool. Therefore, virtual communication will be absolutely essential to get your work done...

3. WHAT IS "WORKING REMOTE" REALLY FOR YOU?

Many people want to work remotely because of the flexibility it allows. You can work anywhere and at any time of the day...

4. WHAT DO YOU NEED IN YOUR PHYSICAL WORKSPACE TO SUCCEED IN YOUR WORK?

With this question, companies are looking to see what equipment they may need to provide you with and to verify how aware you are of what remote working could mean for you physically and logistically...

5. HOW DO YOU PROCESS INFORMATION?

Several years ago, I was working in a team to plan a big event. My supervisor made us all work as a team before the big day. One of our activities has been to find out how each of us processes information...

6. HOW DO YOU MANAGE THE CALENDAR AND THE PROGRAM? WHICH APPLICATIONS / SYSTEM DO YOU USE?

Or you may receive even more specific questions, such as: What's on your calendar? Do you plan blocks of time to do certain types of work? Do you have an open calendar that everyone can see?...

7. HOW DO YOU ORGANIZE FILES, LINKS, AND TABS ON YOUR COMPUTER?

Just like your schedule, how you track files and other information is very important. After all, everything is digital!...

8. HOW TO PRIORITIZE WORK?

The day I watched Marie Forleo's film separating the important from the urgent, my life changed. Not all remote jobs start fast, but most of them are...

9. HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR A MEETING AND PREPARE A MEETING? WHAT DO YOU SEE HAPPENING DURING THE MEETING?

Just as communication is essential when working remotely, so is organization. Because you won't have those opportunities in the elevator or a casual conversation in the lunchroom, you should take advantage of the little time you have in a video or phone conference...

10. HOW DO YOU USE TECHNOLOGY ON A DAILY BASIS, IN YOUR WORK AND FOR YOUR PLEASURE?

This is a great question because it shows your comfort level with technology, which is very important for a remote worker because you will be working with technology over time...