Role at a glance
- Salary
- $220K – $405K/yr
- Location
- San Francisco, United States Palo Alto, United States
- Work arrangement
- On-site
- Employment
- Full-time
- Experience
- typically 4+ years for mid-level, more for senior and staff
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Role Summary
The Backend Platform team builds and maintains infrastructure for authentication, authorization, real-time data flows, service orchestration, and sandboxing. This role leads platform capabilities that support secure, reliable, and scalable product and AI development across Perplexity.
What You'll Do
- Design and implement a sandboxing platform for safely executing untrusted and user-generated code
- Define and extend RBAC and authorization primitives for product capabilities and enterprise controls
- Own backend services involved in authentication and encryption flows, including BYOK-related pieces
- Drive best practices in reliability, observability, and incident response for always-on systems
- Define platform interfaces, SLAs, and integration patterns with product and AI teams
- Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, and make long-term architectural decisions
Generated from the employer's posting. Verify important details before applying.
View full postingQualifications
Experience designing and building backend systems that run in production; strong system design skills; hands-on experience with modern infrastructure such as AWS and Kubernetes; proficiency in Python, Go, or Rust; experience working in security-sensitive areas including authentication, authorization, and encryption.
Required
- Experience designing and building backend systems that run in production
- Strong system design skills
- Hands-on experience with modern infrastructure, such as AWS and Kubernetes
- Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, or Rust
- Ability to work effectively in a multi-language environment
- Comfort working in security-sensitive areas including auth, authorization, and encryption
Original job description
Content provided by the employer
Original job description
Content provided by the employer
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 operations, driving best practices in reliability, observability, and incident response for always‑on systems.
Partner with product and AI teams to define clear platform interfaces, SLAs, and integration patterns so new features can reliably build on shared backend capabilities.
Provide technical leadership across the backend platform area, mentoring other engineers and making long‑term architectural decisions that keep the foundation simple, secure, and evolvable.
Qualifications
Experience designing and building backend systems that run in production (typically 4+ years for mid-level, more for senior and staff).
Strong system design skills, with a track record of creating efficient, reliable, and scalable architectures.
Hands-on experience with modern infrastructure (for example AWS, Kubernetes, and related cloud technologies).
Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, or Rust, and the ability to work effectively in a multi-language environment.
Collaborative mindset and eagerness to solve challenging technical problems with other experienced engineers.
Comfort working in security‑sensitive areas (auth, authorization, encryption) and making pragmatic trade-offs between safety, simplicity, and velocity.
If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above.
About the company
Perplexity
Startup
Perplexity is an innovative technology company that specializes in developing advanced artificial intelligence solutions aimed at enhancing human-computer interaction. With a focus on natural language processing and machine learning, Perplexity empowers users to access information and insights more intuitively and efficiently. The company is dedicated to creating tools that simplify complex data and foster informed decision-making, thereby transforming the way individuals and organizations engage with knowledge. Through its commitment to excellence and user-centric design, Perplexity is shaping the future of information retrieval and analysis.
Perplexity is an innovative technology company that specializes in developing advanced artificial intelligence solutions aimed at enhancing human-computer interaction. With a focus on natural language processing and machine learning, Perplexity empowers users to access information and insights more intuitively and efficiently. The company is dedicated to creating tools that simplify complex data and foster informed decision-making, thereby transforming the way individuals and organizations engage with knowledge. Through its commitment to excellence and user-centric design, Perplexity is shaping the future of information retrieval and analysis.