Backend Software Engineer - Search

At Perplexity, we've experienced tremendous growth and adoption since publicly launching the world's first fully functional conversational answer engine in 2022. We've grown from answering 2.5 million questions per day at the start of 2024 to around 20 million daily queries in December 2024. We also offer Perplexity Enterprise Pro, which counts leading companies like Nvidia, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Bridgewater, and Zoom as customers.

To support our rapid expansion, we've raised significant funding from some of the most respected technology investors. Our investor base includes IVP, NEA, Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Naval Ravikant, Tobi Lutke, and many other visionary individuals. In 2024, our employee base grew nearly 300%, and we're just getting started.

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.