Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022 and growing rapidly as one of the world’s leading AI platforms. Perplexity has raised over $1B in venture investment from some of the world’s most visionary and successful leaders, including Elad Gil, Daniel Gross, Jeff Bezos, Accel, IVP, NEA, NVIDIA, Samsung, and many more. Our objective is to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making for people and assistive AI wherever decisions are being made. Throughout human history, change and innovation have always been driven by curious people. Today, curious people use Perplexity to answer more than 780 million queries every month–a number that’s growing rapidly for one simple reason: everyone can be curious.
We are seeking an experienced Backend Software Engineer to join our Crawler team. In this role, you will design, develop, and operate systems that ingest, process, and manage web-scale data in support of our next generation of advanced search technologies. This is a critical, high-impact engineering position, requiring expertise across both backend and frontend components of our data acquisition stack.
Responsibilities
- Take ownership of and lead projects focused on developing large-scale web crawlers, ingestion pipelines, and data processing systems.
- Build, maintain, and optimize core backend and frontend components for crawler services, including storage, retrieval, and UI dashboards for data management.
- Collaborate closely with Search and Infrastructure teams to ensure the reliable, high-quality ingestion and processing of billions of web pages.
- Architect and implement fullstack features and scalable distributed systems that handle high-load and real-time data operations.
- Rapidly iterate, experiment with novel approaches, and continuously enhance system performance, usability, and reliability.
Qualifications
- Minimum of 5 years of software development experience, with strong knowledge of data structures and algorithms in at least one of the following languages: Python, C++, Rust, or Go.
- Experience with large-scale web crawlers is highly desirable.
- Proven experience building, deploying, and optimizing high-load, distributed, and hardware-adjacent services.
- Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, with hands-on experience in Kubernetes (K8s) and AWS.
- Demonstrated passion for writing clean, efficient, and scalable systems.
Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including, experience and expertise.
Equity: In addition to the base salary, equity may be part of the total compensation package.
Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents. Includes a 401(k) plan.
