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Backend Product Engineer

San Francisco Bay Area

Perplexity is looking for a backend engineer to join our small team revolutionizing the way people search and interact with the internet. You will be responsible for leading design, implementation, and scaling of systems that power web and mobile products.

Perplexity is rapidly scaling both in number of use cases and number of users. Our backend stack is Python, Postgresql, DynamoDB, Redis, and Kubernetes, built alongside inhouse AI and search interfaces.

Responsibilities

  • Building systems that ingest and process data from the web and other sources
  • Maintaining and optimizing interfaces that interact with databases and caching systems
  • Work closely with all clients and frontend engineers to understand product requirements
  • Work closely with machine learning and data science teams to iterate on nondeterministic systems
  • Manage a complex orchestration system with many moving parts and interfaces
  • Scaling and load balancing multiple services with rapidly changing needs

Qualifications

  • Strong experience with Python
  • Strong experience with databases and caching
  • Experience working with high scale data and nondeterministic systems like LLMs
  • Experience with infrastructure at scale, ideally Kubernetes
  • 4+ years of engineering experience

Our cash compensation range for this role is $200,000 - $250,000.

At Perplexity, we've experienced tremendous growth and adoption since publicly launching the world's first fully functional conversational answer engine just over a year ago. Our AI-powered search assistant has amassed 10 million monthly active users as of early 2024, with our mobile apps installed over 1 million times across iOS and Android devices. In 2023 alone, we served over 500 million queries from users around the globe.

To support our rapid expansion, we've raised significant funding from some of the most respected investors in technology. In January 2024, we raised $73.6 million in a Series B round led by IVP, with participation from NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos' investment fund, NEA, Databricks, and other prominent firms. We followed that up with a $62.7 million Series B1 round in April 2024 led by Daniel Gross, valuing Perplexity at over $1 billion.
Our prominent investor base includes IVP, NEA, Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Naval Ravikant, Tobi Lutke, and many other visionary individuals.
 
Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including, experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.
 
Equity: In addition to the base salary, equity is part of the total compensation package.
Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents. Includes a 401(k) plan.
 
 

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