Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Backend Platform)
Perplexity — San Francisco
Posted 2026-06-03
ABOUT THE ROLE
The Backend Platform team is the backbone of Perplexity’s product reliability, scalability, and performance, enabling every product and AI team to build with confidence.
This high‑impact group builds and maintains critical infrastructure, including backend systems for authentication, authorization, real-time data flows, service orchestration, and sandboxing, to ensure fast, reliable, and secure user experiences. By setting rigorous standards for code quality, uptime and performance, the Platform team ensures everyone at Perplexity can innovate at speed on top of a robust, well-architected foundation.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Lead the design and implementation of our sandboxing platform to safely execute untrusted and user‑generated code while meeting strict performance and reliability requirements.
- Define and extend our RBAC and authorization primitives, ensuring they scale with new product capabilities and enterprise controls.
- Own key backend services involved in authentication and encryption flows (including BYOK‑related pieces), partnering with Security and Infra on defense‑in‑depth.
- Set the technical bar for backend platform design and operation