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Perplexity AI is hiring a backend engineer to join the Multimodal team, which builds the experiences and infrastructure enabling AI interaction beyond text—including realtime voice, vision, and the platform systems behind them. You'll design and scale distributed systems that carry live voice sessions in production, owning the full path from user input to AI response.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and scale the backend session-worker architecture powering realtime voice, including durable per-session workers, provider routing, and stateful streaming over gRPC
- Own distributed-systems problems end-to-end: session lifecycle, crash recovery, reconnection and replay, multi-region deployment, and graceful degradation under production load
- Build provider-agnostic streaming protocols from backend to the Rust SDK powering voice across all client stacks
- Drive new products and initiatives in voice and multimodal AI from problem definition through technical design, implementation, and launch
- Build the orchestration layer enabling live voice models to delegate work to tools, agents, and long-running tasks safely, asynchronously, and at scale
- Partner closely with SDK, client, infrastructure, and model teams; work across the stack when needed
Required qualifications:
- 4+ years professional software engineering experience building backend or distributed systems
- Strong experience in Rust, Python, or Go (primary languages are Rust and Python)
- Production experience designing and operating distributed systems: streaming RPC (gRPC or similar), stateful services, message-driven architectures, failure recovery
- Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure—deploying, scaling, and operating services on AWS or equivalent
- Strong product judgment and ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions
- Genuine interest in AI products and willingness to learn quickly
Nice-to-have experience includes realtime media systems (voice, audio streaming, WebRTC, low-latency transport), full-stack development, LLM/speech model/computer vision integration, agent frameworks and tool-calling architectures, or experience at fast-growing startups.
About Perplexity AI
AI / Data / Infrastructure — AI answer engine and search product for consumers and enterprises.
