Backend Software Engineer

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022 and growing rapidly as one of the world’s leading AI platforms. Perplexity has raised over $1B in venture investment from some of the world’s most visionary and successful leaders, including Elad Gil, Daniel Gross, Jeff Bezos, Accel, IVP, NEA, NVIDIA, Samsung, and many more. Our objective is to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making for people and assistive AI wherever decisions are being made. Throughout human history, change and innovation have always been driven by curious people. Today, curious people use Perplexity to answer more than 780 million queries every month–a number that’s growing rapidly for one simple reason: everyone can be curious. 

Perplexity is looking for an experienced 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 backend systems that power web, mobile, and browser products.

Tech Stack: Python | PostgreSQL | DynamoDB | Redis | FastAPI

Teams Hiring

Enterprise

The Enterprise Team at Perplexity designs and builds core platform features like rich file attachments, secure file and app connectors (using cutting-edge Model Context Protocol), and Spaces for streamlined collaboration—capabilities widely used by both enterprise and regular users. The team owns uniquely challenging domains at the intersection of AI, automation, and knowledge management, directly shaping how millions of people work with private data, files, and productivity apps across Perplexity. Their small, expert group operates with high autonomy, developing systems that set industry standards and deliver massive, visible product impact.

Growth

The Growth team shapes how millions of people experience Perplexity. We rapidly experiment and launch new ideas across all user-facing surfaces at Perplexity including onboarding, verticals like Students, and premium Max Tier. We build AI-powered features such as personalized prompts, auto-generated study guides, and contextual upsell nudges, driving user activation, retention, and revenue across all platforms. We own Perplexity’s growth platform, including experimentation framework, feature flagging, and notifications, to mobilize impactful feature development across the company. Engineers have outsized impact, building both the product and the platform that power our company’s growth.

Billing

The Billing team powers how users subscribe to and pay for Perplexity, building seamless subscription experiences across all tiers. We partner with business and finance teams to define new pricing and subscription models, while also driving growth through partner integrations that expand distribution and brand presence. We develop and maintain secure, scalable systems—including agentic payments that autonomously interact with payment platforms—ensuring reliable financial transactions for millions of users worldwide. By shaping both user experience and revenue infrastructure, the Billing team sits at the core of Perplexity’s growth and sustainability.

Consumer Verticals

With AI-powered exploration and browsing, personalization and memory, live data visualization, comparison, and checkout, Perplexity is reimagining the consumer experience across verticals such as travel, shopping, health, real estate, finance, sports, live events and ticketing, and more. Each of these verticals represents an opportunity for Perplexity to disrupt massive markets dominated by slower-moving incumbents. Agentic actions powered by Comet unlock novel consumer experiences such as automated shopping and travel purchases, restaurant reservations, complete travel itineraries planned and booked from scratch, automated investing, and more.

Responsibilities

• Build scalable systems that ingest and process data from the web, files, and other sources.
• Optimize interfaces that interact with databases and caching systems.
• Collaborate with PMs, frontend engineers, and other stakeholders to understand product requirements.
• Work closely with AI, Search, and Data Science teams to iterate on non-deterministic systems.
• Manage a complex orchestration system with many moving parts and interfaces.
• Scale, optimize, and load balance multiple services with rapidly changing needs.

Qualifications

• Strong experience with Python
• Strong experience with databases and caching
• Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure at scale
• Experience working with high-scale data and non-deterministic systems like LLMs
• 4+ years of engineering experience

Our compensation range for this role is $180,000 - $300,000

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 may be part of the total compensation package.
Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents. Includes a 401(k) plan.