Backend Software 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 Search Backend 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.

Responsibilities

• You will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining critical parts of a large-scale search engine, improving its performance and capabilities
• Architect, develop, and optimize core search infrastructure to support large-scale data ingestion, indexing, and querying
• Continuously monitor and improve the speed, scalability, and efficiency of search pipelines, including query parsing, retrieval, and result ranking
• Manage search clusters and services using modern cloud infrastructure tools (AWS, Kubernetes, etc.), ensuring high availability and fault tolerance
• Work closely with product teams, data engineers, and machine learning teams to ensure search capabilities align with business goals and user needs

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with Python, Java and/or C++
• Development of distributed systems
• Kubernetes (K8s)
• AWS (SQS, DynamoDB, EC2, S3, Lambda)
• Apache Spark
• Performance testing

Bonus

• Search system development (indexing/runtime/crawling)
• MLOps development and/or operations

The cash compensation range for this role is $80,000 - $160,000.

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.