Role details
ABOUT THE ROLE
- 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 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 performance, the Platform team ensures everyone at Perplexity can innovate at speed on top of a robust, well-architected foundation.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Lead the design and implementation of our sandboxing platform to safely execute untrusted and user‑generated code while meeting strict performance and reliability requirements.
- Define and extend our RBAC and authorization primitives, ensuring they scale with new product capabilities and enterprise controls.
- Own key backend services involved in authentication and encryption flows (including BYOK‑related pieces), partnering with Security and Infra on defense‑in‑depth.
- Set the technical bar for backend platform design and operations, driving best practices in reliability, observability, and incident response for always‑on systems.
- Partner with product and AI teams to define clear platform interfaces, SLAs, and integration patterns so new features can reliably build on shared backend capabilities.
- Provide technical leadership across the backend platform area, mentoring other engineers and making long‑term architectural decisions that keep the foundation simple, secure, and evolvable.
QUALIFICATIONS
- Experience designing and building backend systems that run in production (typically 4+ years for mid-level, more for senior and staff).
- Strong system design skills, with a track record of creating efficient, reliable, and scalable architectures.
- Hands-on experience with modern infrastructure (for example AWS, Kubernetes, and related cloud technologies).
- Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, or Rust, and the ability to work effectively in a multi-language environment.
- Collaborative mindset and eagerness to solve challenging technical problems with other experienced engineers.
- Comfort working in security‑sensitive areas (auth, authorization, encryption) and making pragmatic trade-offs between safety, simplicity, and velocity.
If you're excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't match every qualification listed above.