Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Storage Platform)
Role summary by JobGrid
Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Storage Platform) at Perplexity: San Francisco, United States; On-site; IT; Back End Engineer. This listing is part of JobGrid's Software engineer jobs from public company career pages. JobGrid adds normalized role facts, source context, and a path to the employer application page so candidates can compare the listing before applying.
- Location and workplace: San Francisco, United States, On-site
- Role classification: IT, Back End Engineer
- Source freshness: checked by JobGrid on 2026-06-10.
- Application path: candidates continue to the employer application page with non-personal referral tags.
About Perplexity AI
Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine built to serve the world’s curiosity with fast, trustworthy answers grounded in the live web and backed by clear citations. It combines multiple leading models with real-time search to synthesize up-to-date, source-linked responses instead of traditional search results. On top of this foundation, Perplexity is rolling out Computer, a general-purpose AI worker that can use software like a human to research, build, and execute end-to-end workflows for users.
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.