Backend Software Engineer

Perplexity is looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to join our small team revolutionizing the way people search and interact with the internet. You will be responsible for leading design, implementation, and scaling of backend systems that power web, mobile, and browser products. Tech Stack: Python | Go | Rust | TypeScript | FastAPI | PostgreSQL | Redis | Docker | vLLM | AWS TEAMS HIRING FILE AGENT The File Agent team builds and owns the intelligent, scalable, and secure platform that enables agentic file editing and processing across Perplexity products. They design the infrastructure and APIs that allow agents to autonomously modify, restructure, and generate files across formats and storage systems. The team delivers capabilities and performance improvements for both human-in-the-loop and automated file processing. ENTERPRISE GROWTH The Enterprise Growth team builds the core platform capabilities that make Perplexity a secure, reliable, and adoption-driving product for enterprise customers, owning end-to-end experiences across enterprise authentication (SSO, SCIM, RBAC), org creation and onboarding (white-glove and self-serve flows, invitations, discovery of existing orgs), and admin control and visibility (feature/model/connector controls, Comet controls, audit logs, usage analytics, and growth-related upsell surfaces) to ensure enterprises can confidently deploy Perplexity at scale and realize measurable business impact. GROWTH The Growth team shapes how millions of people experience Perplexity. We rapidly experiment and launch new ideas across all user-facing surfaces at Perplexity including onboarding, verticals like Students, and premium Max Tier. We build AI-powered features such as personalized prompts, auto-generated study guides, and contextual upsell nudges, driving user activation, retention, and revenue across all platforms. We own Perplexity’s growth platform, including experimentation framework, feature flagging, and notifications, to mobilize impactful feature development across the company. Engineers have outsized impact, building both the product and the platform that power our company’s growth. AGENTIC COMMERCE The Commerce team owns the billing platform that powers monetization across all Perplexity products — from consumer subscriptions and enterprise contracts to the usage-based billing system that is the foundation monetizing Perplexity Computer and our agentic products. We build and scale the abstractions that let product teams launch new paid offerings, run pricing experiments, and convert users into paying customers. As AI agents begin to browse, shop, and transact on behalf of users, the billing platform must keep pace — metering every action in real time, enforcing credit budgets, and settling costs across entirely new interaction models. The Commerce team sits at the core of Perplexity's growth and sustainability. CORE EXPERIENCE The Core Experience team designs and builds the refined human‑machine interface at the heart of Perplexity: the core asking experience across web, mobile, Comet and Computer. We own the cross-platform foundations that make querying feel effortless—expressive UX patterns, tight frontend interactions, and clear information hierarchy—while maintaining the clean abstractions and performant APIs that client platform teams rely on. This team is engineering-led and highly technical, working closely with platform owners to solve hard cross-cutting problems and uphold uncompromising standards for design, architecture, and craft. We obsess over core quality—latency, reliability, and extensibility—so Perplexity stays fast, consistent, and scalable as LLMs and agents evolve. LIVE EVENTS With AI-powered exploration and browsing, personalization and memory, live data visualization, comparison, and checkout, Perplexity is reimagining the consumer experience across verticals such as travel, shopping, health, real estate, finance, sports, live events and ticketing, and more. Each of these verticals represents an opportunity for Perplexity to disrupt massive markets dominated by slower-moving incumbents. Agentic actions powered by Comet unlock novel consumer experiences such as automated shopping and travel purchases, restaurant reservations, complete travel itineraries planned and booked from scratch, automated investing and financial analysis, and more. SENIOR/STAFF PLATFORM The Platform team is the backbone of Perplexity’s product reliability, scalability, and performance, enabling every product and AI team to build with confidence. This small, high-impact group builds and maintains critical infrastructure—from backend systems such as authentication, real-time data flows, and service orchestration to frontend frameworks that ensure fast, reliable, and secure user experiences. By setting rigorous standards for code quality, uptime, and developer productivity, the Platform team ensures everyone at Perplexity can innovate at speed on top of a robust, well-archit