Backed by Accel, Bessemer and NEA.
About the role
Design, build, and scale the backend session-worker architecture that powers realtime voice: durable per-session workers, provider routing, and stateful streaming over gRPC. Own distributed-systems problems end-to-end — session lifecycle, crash recovery, reconnection and replay, multi-region deployment, and graceful degradation under real production load.
What they're looking for
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend or distributed systems
- Strong experience in Rust, Python, or Go (we work primarily in Rust and Python)
- Experience designing and operating production distributed systems: streaming RPC (gRPC or similar), stateful services, message-driven architectures, and failure recovery
- Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure — deploying, scaling, and operating services on AWS or equivalent
- Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions
- Genuine interest and adoption of AI products and willingness to learn quickly
More about this role
We are hiring builders to define how people talk to, show things to, and hear from AI
In 2026, we launched Computer, the defining product for the new era of agentic AI. We've scaled beyond the millions of people using Perplexity every day for research, shopping, investing and curiosity into a new paradigm of using AI to transform knowledge into action.
The Multimodal team builds the experiences and infrastructure that move AI interaction beyond touch and text — realtime voice, vision, and the platform systems behind them. We own the full path from a user speaking into a device to an answer coming back: the realtime session infrastructure that connects clients to frontier audio models, the backend orchestration that routes, records, and supervises live sessions, and the SDK that powers voice and multimodal experiences across Perplexity's apps.
As a backend engineer on Multimodal, you will design and scale the distributed systems that carry live voice sessions in production — and drive entirely new products at the intersection of voice, vision, and agents.
Craftsmanship. We build high quality, tasteful products targeting both the AI native and AI curious.
Ownership. You identify the...
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