Member of Technical Staff
Build and scale distributed backend systems powering Perplexity’s realtime voice and multimodal AI experiences. The role requires 4+ years of backend or distributed-systems experience and strong Rust, Python, or Go skills, with opportunities to work across SDKs, infrastructure, models, and agent orchestration.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and scale backend session-worker architecture for realtime voice, including durable per-session workers, provider routing, and stateful streaming over gRPC.
- Own distributed-systems problems end-to-end, including session lifecycle, crash recovery, reconnection and replay, multi-region deployment, and graceful degradation under production load.
- Build provider-agnostic streaming protocols from the backend to the Rust SDK powering voice across client stacks.
- Drive voice and multimodal AI products from problem definition through technical design, implementation, and launch.
- Build orchestration that enables live voice models to delegate work to tools, agents, and long-running tasks safely and asynchronously at scale.
- Partner with SDK, client, infrastructure, and model teams, working across backend services and client-facing APIs as needed.
Requirements
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend or distributed systems.
- Strong experience with Rust, Python, or Go; the team primarily uses Rust and Python.
- Experience designing and operating production distributed systems, including streaming RPC, stateful services, message-driven architectures, and failure recovery.
- Understanding of cloud infrastructure, including deploying, scaling, and operating services on AWS or equivalent.
- Strong product judgment and ability to translate user problems into effective technical solutions.
- Genuine interest in and adoption of AI products, with willingness to learn quickly.
Nice to Have
- Experience with realtime media systems, voice, audio streaming, WebRTC, or low-latency transport.
- Full-stack range, including backend services, 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.
- Experience at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team.
Skills
Rust, Python, Go, Distributed Systems, gRPC, AWS, Webrtc, Audio Streaming, LLMs, Computer Vision, Agent Frameworks, Tool Calling
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