# Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Multimodal) at Perplexity

- Company: Perplexity
- What the company does: Backed by Accel, Bessemer and NEA.
- Company website: http://www.perplexity.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: San Francisco
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $220K to $405K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-08-27
- Apply by: 2026-10-11
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity/6e328b72-9f57-49e0-a1a8-4428abf8ff81
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/perplexity-member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-multimodal/

## 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

Tags: AI Products