EngineeringOn-site

Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Storage Platform)

Perplexity · On-site

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Last seen by MeritLog September 11, 2026Source: AshbySource version: ashby-public-job-posting-v1

MeritLog read this listing from Perplexity's Ashby job board and last checked it on September 11, 2026.

Source: the employer's Ashby job board. Open the original listing for current details.

Job details

Work model: On-site
Salary: $220K - $405K
Location: San Francisco

Hiring context

How this role compares at Perplexity

Perplexity has 114 live roles in MeritLog’s catalog across 11 job families, and 41 of them are in engineering. 98 of those listings publish a pay range, a disclosure rate of 86%.

This role's posted range of $220K - $405K sits above 69% of the 97 other Perplexity roles quoted over the same currency and period.

Perplexity concentrates this hiring in:

Counted across the job boards MeritLog tracks, at the time this page was served. Pay comparisons use only listings that publish a complete range in the same currency and period.

What the role asks for

What you'd do

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.

What they're asking for

5+ years of experience building and operating large‑scale backend or infrastructure systems in production.Experience
Deep hands‑on experience with at least one major database technology (for example, Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, Cassandra) and familiarity with modern cloud storage services.Skill
Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization for high‑throughput, low‑latency workloads.Skill
Proven track record of owning services end‑to‑end, including design, implementation, deployment, and on‑call.Skill
Proficiency in at least one programming language used for backend systems (such as Go, Rust, or Python).Skill
Effective communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner closely with product, infra, and AI teams.Skill

Parsed by MeritLog from the employer’s own posting. The full description follows below.

Job description

About the Role 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. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - 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. QUALIFICATIONS - 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.

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