Role details
PERPLEXITY API PLATFORM
- Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration to serve the world's most discerning users.
- The Perplexity API Platform brings our technology to the world's most discerning developers.
- From exabyte-scale knowledge indexes to codegen-first agent runtimes, the building blocks behind Perplexity's applications are some of the most battle-tested AI systems in the industry.
- We believe these same building blocks can and should power the aspirations of builders everywhere.
- It's one thing to solve planet-scale retrieval, long-horizon orchestration, and other foundational AI challenges within a single product ecosystem.
- The true measure of success is to turn those solutions into elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike.
- Our API Platform delivers frontier intelligence to thousands of customers: startups, trillion-dollar enterprises, U.S. and allied governments, and everyone in between.
- We've achieved incredible scale, yet we're just getting started. Join us to build tools for curious minds.
ABOUT THIS ROLE
- Perplexity is seeking strong engineers with a passion for delivering frontier intelligence and infrastructure to developers.
- Our company builds technology that reshapes how people search, reason, and interact with the world around them.
- Week after week, we observe increasing demand for programmatic interfaces to that technology.
- The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling these interfaces.
- As a member of our team, you'll work on an eclectic portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and frontier topics that often change with each passing month.
- Throughout this work, you'll prioritize great developer and agent experience alike.
- You'll also define technical strategy for how we scale to meet compounding growth exponentials (number of customers, agents per customer, compute/retrieval per agent, etc.).
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
- Own and evolve the API gateway and routing layer: authentication, authorization, rate limiting and quotas, usage metering, and request routing across heterogeneous upstream services.
- Build the paved road for API services: standardized service scaffolding, container builds, CI/CD, Kubernetes and Helm deployment, and progressive rollouts with fast rollback, so a new API product goes from idea to production in days, not weeks.
- Build API governance into the platform: contract-first schemas, breaking-change detection in CI, versioning and deprecation workflows, and SDKs and documentation generated from a single source of truth.
- Unify cross-cutting capabilities (billing and usage, rate limiting, organization and identity settings, analytics and observability) so every API product gets them by default instead of rebuilding them.
- Ensure low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance optimization (including on upstream systems).
- Harden system security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments, and operate what you build: SLOs, on-call, and incident response.
- Collaborate across teams to bring novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform, and partner with infrastructure teams on compute, networking, secrets, and security.
- Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today.
- Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.
QUALIFICATIONS
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust, including significant time building platforms or infrastructure used by other engineering teams.
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
- Hands-on experience building and operating API gateways, reverse proxies, or routing layers: authentication and authorization, rate limiting and quotas, request routing, traffic shaping, and per-request observability.
- Experience building API governance tooling: contract-first API design, breaking-change detection and API linting in CI, versioning and deprecation workflows, and SDKs and documentation generated from the contract.
- Platform depth across the build and deploy path: you have owned CI/CD pipelines, container builds and base images, infrastructure as code, and progressive delivery (canary or blue-green) on a major cloud.
- A track record of owning a platform end to end: identifying the need, designing it, aligning the teams that depend on it, shipping it, and operating it, while raising the engineering bar for the teams building on it.
- Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike.
Strong plus:
- Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards).
- Usage-based billing and metering systems, multi-tenant organization and identity models, and usage analytics pipelines.
- Observability for API platforms: structured logging pipelines, metrics, tracing, and SLO tooling.