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
- 5+ years of experience building and operating large‑scale backend or infrastructure systems in production.
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Role Summary
The Storage Platform team builds and operates storage infrastructure for Perplexity products and AI workloads, spanning relational, NoSQL, and vector databases. The role focuses on storage reliability, performance, and tools that help product teams use storage at scale.
What You'll Do
- Design, operate, and improve the storage platform, including relational, NoSQL, and vector databases.
- Own reliability, performance, and availability SLOs for stateful systems; analyze storage incidents and drive long-term fixes.
- Develop storage abstractions, APIs, and tooling for product teams.
- Work with AI, infra, and product teams on data models and access patterns for latency, throughput, and cost needs.
- Plan capacity, benchmark, and manage storage cluster scaling, migrations, and deprecations.
Generated from the employer's posting. Verify important details before applying.
View full postingQualifications
Required: 5+ years building and operating large-scale backend or infrastructure systems in production; hands-on experience with at least one major database technology and familiarity with modern cloud storage services; fundamentals in distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization; end-to-end service ownership, including design, implementation, deployment, and on-call; proficiency in a backend programming language such as Go, Rust, or Python; communication and collaboration skills for partnering with product, infra, and AI teams.
Required
- 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend or infrastructure systems in production.
- Hands-on experience with at least one major database technology, such as Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, or Cassandra, and familiarity with...
- Fundamentals in distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization for high-throughput, low-latency workloads.
- Track record of owning services end-to-end, including design, implementation, deployment, and on-call.
- Proficiency in at least one backend systems programming language, such as Go, Rust, or Python.
- Communication and collaboration skills to partner with product, infra, and AI teams.
Original job description
Content provided by the employer
Original job description
Content provided by the employer
About the Role
The Storage Platform team owns the infrastructure that powers how Perplexity persists, retrieves, and manages data across all systems, ensuring high availability, performance, and cost-efficiency for every product and AI workload.
This foundational, high-impact group is responsible for the full spectrum of storage technologies – relational databases, vector databases, custom storage implementations, and the tooling to provision, monitor, and optimize them at scale.
By building robust abstractions and operational excellence around storage, the team enables engineers across Perplexity to focus on product innovation while trusting that data is fast, reliable, and always accessible.
Key Responsibilities
Design, operate, and continuously improve the storage platform that underpins all Perplexity products and AI workloads, including relational, NoSQL, and vector databases.
Own reliability, performance, and availability SLOs for stateful systems, driving root cause analysis and long‑term fixes for storage‑related incidents.
Define and evolve opinionated storage abstractions, APIs, and tooling that make it simple and safe for product teams to consume storage at scale.
Partner with AI, infra, and product teams to design data models and access patterns that meet low‑latency, high‑throughput, and cost‑efficiency requirements.
Lead capacity planning, benchmarking, and lifecycle management for storage clusters, including scaling, migrations, and deprecations.
Qualifications
5+ years of experience building and operating large‑scale backend or infrastructure systems in production.
Deep hands‑on experience with at least one major database technology (for example, Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, Cassandra) and familiarity with modern cloud storage services.
Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization for high‑throughput, low‑latency workloads.
Proven track record of owning services end‑to‑end, including design, implementation, deployment, and on‑call.
Proficiency in at least one programming language used for backend systems (such as Go, Rust, or Python).
Effective communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner closely with product, infra, and AI teams.
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.