Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Multimodal)

Job summary

Responsibilities

Perplexity’s mission is to power curiosity. Curious people are the people who drive change in the world. Driving change is a continuous cycle of learning, building, and integrating.

• 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…
• Build provider-agnostic streaming protocols from our backend to the Rust SDK that powers voice across every client stack.
• Drive new products and initiatives in voice and multimodal AI from problem definition through technical design, implementation, and launch.
• Build the orchestration layer that lets live voice models delegate work to tools, agents, and long-running tasks — safely, asynchronously, and at scale.

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.

Tech stack

• Rust
• Python
• AWS