Staff Developer Experience Engineer

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022 and growing rapidly as one of the world's leading AI platforms. Perplexity has raised over $1B in venture investment from some of the world's most visionary and successful leaders, including Elad Gil, Daniel Gross, Jeff Bezos, Accel, IVP, NEA, NVIDIA, Samsung, and many more. Our objective is to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making for people and assistive AI wherever decisions are being made. Throughout human history, change and innovation have always been driven by curious people. Today, curious people use Perplexity to answer more than 780 million queries every month–a number that's growing rapidly for one simple reason: everyone can be curious.

Perplexity is seeking a Staff Developer Experience Engineer (DevEx) to join our team in revolutionizing the way people search and interact with the internet. As a Staff-level engineer, you will take technical ownership of our developer infrastructure, lead architectural initiatives, and drive cross-functional collaboration to optimize the development experience for our growing engineering organization.

he ideal candidate is a seasoned engineer with deep expertise in build systems, containerization solutions, continuous integration, testing frameworks, and large-scale infrastructure. You will mentor other engineers, influence technical strategy, and ensure our developer tools scale with Perplexity's AI-driven platform.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and architecture of scalable developer infrastructure systems that empower every Perplexity engineer to do their best work.
• Drive cross-team initiatives to dramatically boost reliability, speed, and efficiency of our largest builds and CI/CD pipelines.
• Own and evolve the technical strategy for developer tooling, establishing long-term architectural vision while delivering incremental improvements.
• Mentor engineers across teams on developer experience best practices and provide technical leadership on complex infrastructure challenges.
• Lead comprehensive evaluations of external tools, vendors, and technologies to ensure strategic alignment with our AI platform architecture.
• Design and maintain seamless development environments and IDE integrations across multiple languages (Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust).
• Establish and enforce standards for testing, deployment, and monitoring that enable safe, rapid software delivery at scale.
• Collaborate with engineering leadership to identify and resolve systemic developer productivity bottlenecks.
• Champion a culture of operational excellence and developer empathy across the organization.
• Drive adoption of new technologies and practices that improve engineering velocity and code quality.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience, with 3+ years leading end-to-end architecture and infrastructure projects as a staff-level or equivalent engineer.
• Demonstrated technical leadership in designing, implementing, and scaling developer productivity platforms in high-growth environments, ideally with an AI, SaaS, or large-scale cloud component.
• Expertise in build systems (Bazel, Buck, or similar), orchestration tools (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD frameworks. Experience integrating new languages and frameworks into existing infrastructure. Strong programming skills in multiple languages including Python, TypeScript, Go, or Rust.
• Experience leading architectural decisions and mentoring engineers on complex technical challenges.
• Proven cross-org influence, including setting organizational technical direction, standardizing best practices, and leading multi-team initiatives. Deep understanding of software development lifecycle challenges faced by engineering teams operating at scale.
• Experience with AI/ML infrastructure and tooling is strongly preferred given Perplexity's focus.
• Exceptional communication skills—able to articulate complex technical concepts and drive buy-in across technical and non-technical audiences.Track record of building and maintaining internal developer tools, testing frameworks, and deployment infrastructure.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and debugging tools for distributed systems.
• Relentless focus on developer empathy, operational excellence, and the ability to see around corners to anticipate company-scale challenges and opportunities.

Our cash compensation range for this role is $250k - $300k

Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including, experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Equity: In addition to the base salary, equity may be part of the total compensation package.

Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents. Includes a 401(k) plan.