Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Backend API)
About The Position
Perplexity is seeking engineers to develop planet-scale search capabilities for developers and agents. The API Platform team is responsible for the Search API, Agent API, agent-first SDKs, and documentation, focusing on the developer experience at the intersection of Perplexity's infrastructure and the external world. The role involves shaping the future of APIs as agents become primary consumers. The team builds with AI for those who build with AI, targeting individuals who understand the limitations of current developer platforms when working with frontier models and tooling. There are two primary paths into this team: product-minded API engineers focused on schema design, SDK ergonomics, and initial developer experience, and infra-leaning platform engineers concerned with progressive delivery, observability, and maintaining a high-traffic API stack for speed and reliability. Daily tasks will integrate aspects of both areas.
Requirements
- Experience designing and operating distributed, high-load systems.
- Experience building with frontier models and tools (open source and closed source) and ability to detail agentic workflows.
- High autonomy and agency, with a strong product sense focused on developers and customers, anticipating future API user needs, and understanding frontier trends.
- Working fluency with core cloud infrastructure: a major cloud provider, Kubernetes, CI/CD.
- Depth in either API product craft or platform operations, with a genuine interest in the other.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building personal agent loops or harnesses.
- Experience building developer or API tooling in the LLM ecosystem or adjacent domains with rapidly evolving API schemas under real customer load (e.g., fintech, payments).
- Contributions to widely used open-source SDKs, frameworks, or integrations.
Responsibilities
- Own critical APIs end to end, including writing RFCs, implementing, rolling out from staging through canary to full fleet, and iterating post-launch.
- Contribute directly to product codebases in Go, Rust, and Python.
- Build surfaces for agent consumption, such as hosted MCP, tool calling, connectors, and authentication flows.
- Harden the platform for enterprise use, focusing on authentication patterns, data-handling guarantees, guardrails, and security posture for high-load public APIs.
- Own production systems, including creating monitors and dashboards as code, setting up alerts, and writing and acting on postmortems.
- Partner with Research to evaluate frontier capabilities and integrate promising ones into production API features.
- Collaborate with Product, GTM, and customers to identify gaps between builder needs and platform offerings.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
