Senior Backend/Infrastructure Engineer - Search

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 a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to join our small team revolutionizing the way people search and interact with the internet. Your passion and diligence will be critical to ensure a high quality product. This role blends infrastructure expertise with software engineering -- you'll own core systems that power our products and development workflows. 

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain robust, scalable infrastructure to support high-performance search systems
• Develop internal tools and automation to streamline developer workflows and operational efficiency
• Design, deploy, and operate cloud-native systems, primarily on AWS
• Improve and support CI/CD pipelines, testing infrastructure, and release processes
• Debug and optimize Linux systems, containers, and backend services
• Contribute directly to product codebases, working across Python, Go, and other systems languages

Requirements

• Strong background in cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), systems design, and automation
• Deep understanding of Linux internals, performance tuning, and debugging
• Experience building or maintaining CI/CD systems and tooling
• Strong Python skills and fluency in at least one systems language (Go, Rust, C/C++, or Java)
• Comfort working across both infrastructure and application-level code
• A proactive learner who thrives in a fast-paced, innovative environment