Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Multimodal)

Department: AI Products

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $220K – $405K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

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.

Why Perplexity is Different

• Craftsmanship. We build high quality, tasteful products targeting both the AI native and AI curious.

• Ownership. You identify the problem, design the solution and ship it.

• Entrepreneurship. We think like founders, act with urgency, and hustle to deliver for each other and our users.

• Scholarship. Work among highly talented peers, pursuing knowledge and truth, upleveling ourselves, our teams, and our products.

• Partnership. We amplify each others' strengths, break down silos, and give selflessly to help our colleagues deliver excellence.

What you'll do

• 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.

• 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.

• Partner closely with SDK, client, infrastructure, and model teams; work across the stack when the product demands it, from backend services to client-facing APIs.

What we'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.

Nice to have

• Experience with realtime media systems: voice, audio streaming, WebRTC, or low-latency transport.

• Full-stack range — comfort building end-to-end, from backend services through client SDKs or web frontends.

• Experience integrating LLMs, speech models, or computer vision into production systems.

• Experience with agent frameworks, tool-calling architectures, or sandboxed execution environments.

• Time spent at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team.

Our Mission

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.

Learn: curious people constantly learn new things by asking more. They question the status quo in their own expertise and they constantly learn outside of it. Research is essential to them and never ending.

Build: curious people make and create things, to show the world their new answers to problems no one else ever questioned. They take action on what they’ve learned. Makers need tools to create their products, their companies, their reality.

Integrate: they must interact with the world as it is to drive change and adoption. True leaders do not simply build something and hope. They must have armies of agents and workers who can constantly work in millions of small ways.

Repeat. For curious people this is a cycle that never ends.