Member of Technical Staff (Backend Software Engineer, Search Crawler)
- Level
- Staff
Not stated in the posting: salary, work type, visa.
Open. First seen 9 September 2026.
About the role
We are seeking an experienced Backend Software Engineer to join our Crawler team. In this role, you will design, develop, and operate systems that ingest, process, and manage web-scale data in support of our next generation of advanced search technologies. This is a critical, high-impact engineering position, requiring expertise across both backend and frontend components of our data acquisition stack.
Responsibilities
- Take ownership of and lead projects focused on developing large-scale web crawlers, ingestion pipelines, and data processing systems.
- Build, maintain, and optimize core backend and frontend components for crawler services, including storage, retrieval, and UI dashboards for data management.
- Collaborate closely with Search and Infrastructure teams to ensure the reliable, high-quality ingestion and processing of billions of web pages.
- Architect and implement fullstack features and scalable distributed systems that handle high-load and real-time data operations.
- Rapidly iterate, experiment with novel approaches, and continuously enhance system performance, usability, and reliability.
Qualifications
- Minimum of 5 years of software development experience, with strong knowledge of data structures and algorithms in at least one of the following languages: Python, C++, Rust, or Go.
- Experience with large-scale web crawlers is highly desirable.
- Proven experience building, deploying, and optimizing high-load, distributed, and hardware-adjacent services.
- Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, with hands-on experience in Kubernetes (K8s) and AWS.
- Demonstrated passion for writing clean, efficient, and scalable systems.
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
C++
Rare in Perplexity's other 85 open postings.
Standard for backend roles
AWS · Kubernetes · Python
Common in backend postings at any company.
Read against Perplexity's other open postings on this site.
The team: Search HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 15 open in Search. 4 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in March: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
LLM (8 of 15), Rust (8 of 15), Machine Learning (7 of 15), Python (7 of 15), AWS (6 of 15), C++ (5 of 15), Kubernetes (5 of 15)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Member of Technical Staff (Search Crawler Analyst) posted Oct 8
- Member of Technical Staff (Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Agents) posted Oct 6
- Member of Technical Staff (Search Core DevOps Engineer) posted Sep 25
- Member of Technical Staff (Machine Learning Research Engineer) posted Sep 23
- Member of Technical Staff (Search Core, Indexing & Data Pipeline Stream) posted Sep 18
- Internship - Machine Learning Research Engineer posted Sep 2
- Member of Technical Staff (Search Quality Analyst) posted Sep 2
- Member of Technical Staff (Machine Learning Engineer, Ranking Quality - Search) posted Aug 12
- Internship - Search Backend Infra Engineer posted Jul 1
- Internship - Search Machine Learning Engineer posted Apr 8
- Internship - Search Machine Learning Engineer posted Jan 13
- Member of Technical Staff (Search Engine Developer, Search Core) posted Mar 31
- Member of Technical Staff (Machine Learning Engineer, Search) posted Mar 25
- Member of Technical Staff (Backend/Infrastructure Engineer, Search) posted Mar 7
From the team and dates on Perplexity's own job board.
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