Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Storage Platform)
Perplexity·Palo Alto, California, United States | New York, New York, United States | San Francisco, California, United States$220K - $405K·posted 73d ago · last seen 51m agoTrack this application
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Get Started FreeAbout interviewing at Perplexity
One of the few AI startups with a fully published interview guide (perplexity.ai/hub/careers/interview-guide): online application (response within two weeks) → recruiter phone screen → a technical screen that for engineers is 'usually a standard technical programming interview' → a quickly-scheduled onsite of 4–5 interviews including a hiring-manager deep dive on past work and experience anecdotes → a final interview with a Perplexity founder or leader → decision within a week of the onsite. Coding leans Python and mixes LeetCode medium–hard with practical search-flavored tasks (ranking/filtering, concurrency, data handling); system design is AI-native (RAG pipelines, retrieval at scale, LLM serving cost/latency). Applicants are judged 'solely on merit and potential impact' and must show 'frontier knowledge and excellence in at least one area'; roles are broad by default with team matching happening during the onsite, every role — managers included — is hands-on, and building AI products isn't expected but fluency in using AI tools is required. In-person 4 days/week near an office; remote is case-by-case.
Read the full Perplexity interview process →Description
About the Role
The Storage Platform team owns the infrastructure that powers how Perplexity persists, retrieves, and manages data across all systems, ensuring high availability, performance, and cost-efficiency for every product and AI workload.
This foundational, high-impact group is responsible for the full spectrum of storage technologies – relational databases, vector databases, custom storage implementations, and the tooling to provision, monitor, and optimize them at scale.
By building robust abstractions and operational excellence around storage, the team enables engineers across Perplexity to focus on product innovation while trusting that data is fast, reliable, and always accessible.
Key Responsibilities
Design, operate, and continuously improve the storage platform that underpins all Perplexity products and AI workloads, including relational, NoSQL, and vector databases.
Own reliability, performance, and availability SLOs for stateful systems, driving root cause analysis and long‑term fixes for storage‑related incidents.
Define and evolve opinionated storage abstractions, APIs, and tooling that make it simple and safe for product teams to consume storage at scale.
Partner with AI, infra, and product teams to design data models and access patterns that meet low‑latency, high‑throughput, and cost‑efficiency requirements.
Lead capacity planning, benchmarking, and lifecycle management for storage clusters, including scaling, migrations, and deprecations.
Qualifications
5+ years of experience building and operating large‑scale backend or infrastructure systems in production.
Deep hands‑on experience with at least one major database technology (for example, Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, Cassandra) and familiarity with modern cloud storage services.
Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization for high‑throughput, low‑latency workloads.
Proven track record of owning services end‑to‑end, including design, implementation, deployment, and on‑call.
Proficiency in at least one programming language used for backend systems (such as Go, Rust, or Python).
Effective communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner closely with product, infra, and AI teams.
If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above.
Salary Range: $220K - $405K
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