Staff Backend Engineer - API Platform | NYC, Seattle, SF
Staff Backend Engineer - API Platform | NYC, Seattle, SF
Staff Backend Engineer - API Platform | NYC, Seattle, SF
Perplexity
Perplexity is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join their API team, which is central to their mission of redefining information interaction. The role involves designing and operating high-performance APIs, ensuring reliability and security, and optimizing distributed systems. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in backend engineering and a strong understanding of API design and DevOps practices.
Qualification
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust.
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: versioning, schema evolution, idempotency, auth patterns, and performance tuning.
- Hands-on experience running AWS services, plus fluency with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices.
- Experience with LLM or natural-language APIs (latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration) is a strong plus.
- Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt.
Responsibility
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs in Python, Go, or Rust optimized for low latency, high throughput, and strong consistency.
- Lead major technical initiatives, from new platform components to multi-team system redesigns.
- Improve system reliability and security by implementing rate limiting, authentication, observability (metrics, tracing, logging), and automated testing.
- Collaborate across teams to determine when to extend existing systems versus build new, specialized services.
- Translate customer needs into scalable platform capabilities and generalized API features.
- Uphold engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, and internal documentation.
