Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Model Platform)
- Salary
- $220K - $405K
- Level
- Staff
Not stated in the posting: work type, visa.
Open. First seen 9 September 2026.
About the role
About Perplexity AI
In 2026, we launched Computer, the defining product for the new era of agentic AI. We’ve scaled beyond the millions of people using Perplexity every day for research, shopping, investing and curiosity into a new paradigm of using AI to transform knowledge into action.
As an engineer at Perplexity, your role will be to build products and systems that define how AI empowers humans to think, decide and act. You’ll ship fast and work between both product and infrastructure advancements in our technology.
Why Perplexity is different
- Craftsmanship. We build high quality, tasteful products targeting both the AI native and AI curious.
- Ownership. You identify the problem, design the solution and ship it.
- Entrepreneurship. We think like founders, act with urgency, and hustle to deliver for each other and our users.
- Scholarship. Work among highly talented peers, pursuing knowledge and truth, upleveling ourselves, our teams, and our products.
- Partnership. We amplify each others' strengths, break down silos, and give selflessly to help our colleagues deliver excellence.
About the Role
Perplexity is looking for a deeply technical software engineer to own and evolve our model serving platform, which is responsible for connecting our products and research systems with our inference layers. This mission-critical system gives teams one fast, reliable interface across providers.
You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, AI products, and infrastructure. You will make it dramatically easier for teams across Perplexity to adopt new models, run rigorous experiments, and ship dependable products.
The ideal candidate combines sound technical judgment forged in production systems with active curiosity around the rapidly changing capabilities and failure modes of frontier models. You will design core abstractions, lead high-conviction technical decisions, and write production Rust and Python for a service that serves hundreds of millions of model requests per day.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience building and shipping large-scale systems and services with high reliability, availability, and performance.
- Strong software engineering craft, with special care for developer experience and designing future-proof systems that can evolve along with a rapidly advancing AI landscape.
- Proficiency with a general-purpose backend language (Python, Rust, C++, Go) and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes).
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or related fields (or equivalent experience).
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
C++
Rare in Perplexity's other 85 open postings.
Standard for software engineering roles
Python
Common in software engineering postings at any company.
Read against Perplexity's other open postings on this site.
The team: AI Research & Systems
This role is one of 15 open in AI Research & Systems.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
LLM (11 of 15), Python (11 of 15), Machine Learning (8 of 15), Kubernetes (6 of 15), Rust (6 of 15), CUDA (5 of 15), PyTorch (5 of 15)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Engineering Manager (TLM, Agents) posted Sep 13
- Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agents) posted Sep 13
- Member of Technical Staff (TPM, Inference) posted Sep 2
- Member of Technical Staff (Secure Intelligence Institute) posted Aug 27
- Member of Technical Staff (AI Researcher) posted Aug 25
- Engineering Site Lead posted Aug 12
- Member of Technical Staff (Model Behavior) posted Jul 30
- Member of Technical Staff (ML Engineer, Recommendations & User Modeling) posted Jun 6
- Member of Technical Staff (Answer Quality & Evals) posted Apr 13
- Member of Technical Staff (AI Infrastructure Engineer) posted Apr 13
- Member of Technical Staff (AI Infrastructure Engineer) posted Apr 13
- Member of Technical Staff (AI Inference Engineer) posted Apr 13
- Member of Technical Staff (AI Inference Engineer) posted Apr 13
- Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Applied AI) posted Sep 19
From the team and dates on Perplexity's own job board.
Similar jobs
- Software Engineer III/Senior, Infrastructure Platform at ngrok Inc.
Shares 5 skills: Rust, Golang, C++… · same city - Staff Software Engineer, AI Developer Tools at Docker
Shares 5 skills: Rust, Golang, Kubernetes… · Staff level · same city - Senior Software Engineer (SRE), Infrastructure Security at MongoDB
Shares 6 skills: Rust, Golang, C++… · same country - Principal Software Engineer, Agent Infrastructure at Roblox
Shares 5 skills: Rust, Golang, Kubernetes… · Staff level · same country - Staff Software Engineer (Cloud API) at Cyberhaven
Shares 5 skills: Rust, Golang, Kubernetes… · Staff level · same country - Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Enterprise Agent Evals & Efficiency) at Perplexity
Also at this company
Is this your posting and you want it taken down? Email info@careerholo.com.