Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Connector Platform)

Perplexity • San Francisco, CA

10d • $220,000 - $405,000

About The Position

The Connector Platform team builds the data layer that enables Perplexity's agents to access the world's software. This team is responsible for the systems that transform hundreds of diverse integrations (native, MCP, CLI, first-party, and third-party APIs) into a unified, dependable, and well-typed interface that agents can confidently use. The connector platform serves as the core knowledge layer for Computer, enabling agents to discover available tools, understand their functions, decide which to use, and ground their reasoning in real, permissioned, and up-to-date enterprise data. The team maintains a knowledge layer above connectors that manages context, making Computer the central repository for institutional knowledge. While models are becoming commoditized, secure, actionable, and permissioned access to a customer's systems is not. A fast, accurate, and semantically rich connector platform enhances the intelligence of all agents built upon it.

Requirements

• 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 building efficient, reliable, and scalable architectures, ideally including API integration, gateway, or platform-style systems with many heterogeneous downstreams.
• 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.
• Hands-on experience with modern infrastructure (for example AWS, Kubernetes, and related cloud technologies).
• Depth in at least one of: OAuth and authorization protocols, API/connector or MCP-server development, schema and semantic modeling, or building tooling and evaluation for LLM-based agents.
• Comfort working in security-sensitive areas (auth, authorization, credential isolation) and making pragmatic trade-offs between safety, simplicity, and velocity.
• Collaborative mindset and eagerness to solve hard, ambiguous problems alongside other experienced engineers.

Nice To Haves

• If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above.

Responsibilities

• Own the design and implementation of the connector runtime, the system that registers, hosts, and executes built-in connectors, hosted MCP servers, and CLI-backed tools behind a single agent-facing interface.
• Build and extend the semantic layer: tool and entity schemas, capability metadata, relationship modeling, and the mechanisms for capturing and applying organization- and account-specific corrections and knowledge.
• Design the tool-discovery and tool-selection surfaces that agents use to find the right connector and call it correctly, optimizing for both model accuracy and context efficiency.
• Make agent loops robust: structured results, partial-failure and retry semantics, idempotency, pagination, rate-limit handling, and observability into every tool call an agent makes.
• Define authentication, authorization, and credential-isolation patterns for connectors (OAuth flows, BYOK, per-org credential boundaries), partnering with Security and Backend Platform on defense-in-depth.
• Build the connector onboarding path (schemas, fixtures, and evaluation suites) so new connectors ship with measurable quality rather than hope, and drive the eval metrics that tell us a connector actually works inside agent loops.
• Set the technical bar for connector reliability and operability: SLAs, observability, error-rate monitoring, and incident response for an always-on, high-fan-out integration surface.
• Partner with product and AI teams to define clear connector interfaces and integration patterns so new agent capabilities can reliably build on the shared platform.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed