staff software engineering Staff Engineer tech_leadership 5+ yrs · Posted Apr 13, 2026
$220,000 – $405,000
USD per year

About this role

Perplexity is hiring a staff-level Staff Engineer in the software engineering function based in San Francisco, CA. The posting calls out experience with AWS, Docker, DynamoDB, Spark and roughly 5+ years of relevant work. Compensation is listed at $220,000–$405,000 per year.

Role
Staff Engineer
Function
software engineering
Level
staff
Track
Tech leadership
Employment
Full-time
Location
San Francisco, CA
Experience
5+ years
Department
AI
Posted
Apr 13, 2026
AI Summary
Build scalable AI data pipelines, evaluation platforms, and personalization infrastructure powering Perplexity's agent products. Requires strong distributed systems expertise with Spark, AWS, and ML frameworks. Collaborate with AI/ML teams on high-performance infrastructure for millions of users.

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Job description

from Perplexity careers

Perplexity is seeking an experienced Software Engineer focusing on building the next-gen AI Foundation & Platform to help revolutionize the way people search and interact online. In this role, you'll help build Perplexity’s end-to-end AI data, evaluation and personalization infrastructure and flywheel which powers almost all agent products.

Tech Stack: Spark | AWS Data Stack (S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Docker, EKS, Kinesis) | Pytorch | DynamoDB | Databricks | Snowflake | LLM APIs

Perplexity is rapidly scaling both in number of use cases and number of users. Perplexity’s data stack powers scalable, personalized and fast answers for millions of people worldwide.

Responsibilities

  • Collaborate closely with AI Product, Applied ML, Post-Training, and Data Science teams to design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines and data lakes

  • Develop high-performance infrastructure that powers personalization features including memory, discover, and agentic products

  • Create a scalable, multi-modal evaluation platform for all Perplexity AI products, including personalization, pro search, labs, deep research, and Comet

  • Design tools and abstractions on foundational infrastructure to enhance personalization, analytics, recommendations, AI products, and post-training capabilities

  • Holistically improve engineering foundation to support rapid growth of Perplexity products and international user base.

Qualifications

  • Strong programming and data engineering skills, with proficiency in open source & distributed framework(AWS, Spark, Flink, Iceberg, DynamoDB)

    This is an excerpt. Read the full job description on Perplexity careers →
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