Backend Software Engineer - Search

Perplexity is looking for a Search Backend Engineer to join our small team revolutionizing the way people search and interact with the internet. Your passion and diligence will be critical to ensure a high quality product.

Responsibilities

• You will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining critical parts of a large-scale search engine, improving its performance and capabilities
• Architect, develop, and optimize core search infrastructure to support large-scale data ingestion, indexing, and querying
• Continuously monitor and improve the speed, scalability, and efficiency of search pipelines, including query parsing, retrieval, and result ranking
• Manage search clusters and services using modern cloud infrastructure tools (AWS, Kubernetes, etc.), ensuring high availability and fault tolerance
• Work closely with product teams, data engineers, and machine learning teams to ensure search capabilities align with business goals and user needs

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with Python, Java and/or C++
• Development of distributed systems
• Kubernetes (K8s)
• AWS (SQS, DynamoDB, EC2, S3, Lambda)
• Apache Spark
• Performance testing

Bonus

• Search system development (indexing/runtime/crawling)
• MLOps development and/or operations

The cash compensation range for this role is $80,000 - $160,000.

At Perplexity, we've experienced tremendous growth and adoption since publicly launching the world's first fully functional conversational answer engine just over a year ago. Our AI-powered search assistant has amassed 10 million monthly active users as of early 2024, with our mobile apps installed over 1 million times across iOS and Android devices. In 2023 alone, we served over 500 million queries from users around the globe.

To support our rapid expansion, we've raised significant funding from some of the most respected investors in technology. In January 2024, we raised $73.6 million in a Series B round led by IVP, with participation from NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos' investment fund, NEA, Databricks, and other prominent firms. We followed that up with a $62.7 million Series B1 round in April 2024 led by Daniel Gross, valuing Perplexity at over $1 billion.

Our prominent investor base includes IVP, NEA, Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Naval Ravikant, Tobi Lutke, and many other visionary individuals.