PerplexityMember of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Storage Platform)
1mo ago
220000 –405000 USD / yearUSALeadrelational databasesnosqlapi designcapacity planningbenchmarkingmonitoring
Responsible for designing, operating, and improving the storage platform that supports all company products and AI workloads.
Responsibilities
- 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.
- 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.
Requirements
- 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.