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Perplexity is hiring a Backend API Software Engineer to own critical APIs end-to-end for their rapidly growing API Platform. You'll work at the intersection of Perplexity's infrastructure and the external developer ecosystem, shaping how agents and developers interact with the platform.
The role offers two entry points: a product-minded API engineer focused on schema design, SDK ergonomics, and developer experience, or an infrastructure-leaning platform engineer focused on progressive delivery, observability, and reliability at scale. Daily work blends both perspectives.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning critical APIs end-to-end: writing RFCs, shipping implementations, managing rollouts from staging through canary to full fleet, and iterating post-launch
- Contributing directly to product codebases in Go, Rust, and Python
- Building surfaces for agent consumption: hosted MCP, tool calling, connectors, and authentication flows
- Hardening the platform for enterprise use: authentication patterns, data-handling guarantees, guardrails, and security under real load
- Operating what you build: writing monitors and dashboards as code, setting up alerts, and owning postmortems
- Partnering with Research to evaluate frontier capabilities and translate them into production API features
- Working directly with Product, GTM, and customers to identify gaps between builder needs and platform offerings
Required experience:
- Designing and operating distributed, high-load systems
- Daily hands-on work with frontier models and tools (open and closed source); ability to articulate your agentic workflow in detail
- High autonomy and agency paired with strong product sense for developers and customers
- Working fluency with cloud infrastructure (major cloud provider, Kubernetes, CI/CD)
- Depth in either API product craft or platform operations, with genuine interest in the other side
Bonus qualifications:
- Built your own agent loops or harnesses
- Built developer or API tooling in the LLM ecosystem or fast-moving domains like fintech/payments
- Contributed to open-source SDKs, frameworks, or integrations used by developers
About Perplexity AI
AI / Data / Infrastructure — AI answer engine and search product for consumers and enterprises.
