Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Storage Platform)

Perplexity is hiring a Member of Technical Staff on its Storage Platform team in San Francisco. The role focuses on building and running the systems that store and retrieve data for the company’s products and AI workloads, with attention to reliability, speed, and cost. It involves working with relational, NoSQL, and vector databases, plus the internal tools and abstractions that support them at scale. The company is looking for someone with 5+ years of backend or infrastructure experience, strong distributed systems and performance skills, and hands-on experience with major database technologies and cloud storage services. This role suits engineers who are comfortable owning production systems end to end and partnering with other teams on data design and operational improvements.

About the Role The Storage Platform team owns the infrastructure that powers how Perplexity persists, retrieves, and manages data across all systems, ensuring high availability, performance, and cost-efficiency for every product and AI workload. This foundational, high-impact group is responsible for the full spectrum of storage technologies – relational databases, vector databases, custom storage implementations, and the tooling to provision, monitor, and optimize them at scale. By building robust abstractions and operational excellence around storage, the team enables engineers across Perplexity to focus on product innovation while trusting that data is fast, reliable, and always accessible. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Design, operate, and continuously improve the storage platform that underpins all Perplexity products and AI workloads, including relational, NoSQL, and vector databases. - Own reliability, performance, and availability SLOs for stateful systems, driving root cause analysis and long‑term fixes for storage‑related incidents. - Define and evolve opinionated storage abstractions, APIs, and tooling that make it simple and safe for product teams to consume storage at scale. - Partner with AI, infra, and product teams to design data models and access patterns that meet low‑latency, high‑throughput, and cost‑efficiency requirements. - Lead capacity planning, benchmarking, and lifecycle management for storage clusters, including scaling, migrations, and deprecations. QUALIFICATIONS - 5+ years of experience building and operating large‑scale backend or infrastructure systems in production. - Deep hands‑on experience with at least one major database technology (for example, Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, Cassandra) and familiarity with modern cloud storage services. - Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization for high‑throughput, low‑latency workloads. - Proven track record of owning services end‑to‑end, including design, implementation, deployment, and on‑call. - Proficiency in at least one programming language used for backend systems (such as Go, Rust, or Python). - Effective communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner closely with product, infra, and AI teams. If you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every qualification listed above.