Member of Technical Staff (Backend/Infrastructure Engineer, Search)

Perplexity is hiring a Member of Technical Staff (Backend/Infrastructure Engineer, Search) in Belgrade, Serbia. Level rates it ; you can apply on Perplexity.

Level's read on this job

Level rates this role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
Level classes it as a lead role.
Perplexity has 131 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Perplexity is looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to own and improve the backend systems behind our latency-sensitive search stack. You’ll work across high-QPS Rust and Go services, distributed retrieval systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, and deployment tooling.

This role combines infrastructure expertise with software engineering. You’ll take systems from design through production operation and use AI-native tools where they meaningfully improve engineering and operational workflows

Responsibilities

Build and operate scalable, low-latency infrastructure for search serving and retrieval.
Design and improve distributed backend systems that handle high request volumes.
Debug and optimize Linux systems, containers, networking, and production services.
Improve reliability through observability, capacity planning, performance profiling, and incident response.
Design, deploy, and operate cloud-native systems, primarily on AWS and Kubernetes.
Build internal tools and automation for development, testing, debugging, and infrastructure operations.
Improve CI/CD pipelines, release processes, and production rollout safety.
Contribute directly to product codebases across Rust, Go, and other systems languages.
Own systems end to end, from architecture and implementation to deployment and production operation.

Requirements

Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and automation.
Deep understanding of Linux internals, performance analysis, and production debugging.
Experience building or operating latency-sensitive, high-throughput backend systems.
Experience with containers, orchestration, observability, and infrastructure as code.
Experience building or maintaining CI/CD systems and release tooling.
Fluency in at least one systems language, such as Rust, Go, C++, or Java.
Comfort working across infrastructure and application-level code.
Strong ownership and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving environment.

Nice To Have

Experience with search, retrieval, ranking, or other large-scale data-serving systems.
Experience operating Rust services in production.
Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and modern observability systems.
Experience with profiling, capacity planning, and performance optimization.
Experience building AI-assisted developer or operational tooling.

How we rate this

Member of Technical Staff (Backend/Infrastructure Engineer, Search) at Perplexity rates 93 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Member of Technical Staff (Backend/Infrastructure Engineer, Search) is an open job at Perplexity.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The role is based in Belgrade.
The job was posted on March 7, 2025.
Seniority: lead.
Applications are handled by Perplexity. Apply on Perplexity

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