Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Computer Monetization)

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own the billing platform and monetization systems that power Computer and every paid experience across Perplexity.
• Lead features end-to-end, from problem definition through technical design, implementation, and launch, including the billing API abstractions that let product teams ship new SKUs, pricing models, and monetization experiments with minimal friction.
• Build and operate the subscription, invoicing, and usage-based billing systems that serve millions of users across consumer and enterprise plans.
• Hill-climb on reliability: tiered SLOs organized by customer impact, proactive monitoring, and alerting to catch revenue-affecting issues before customers do.
• Partner closely with Finance, Data Science, Growth, Security, Support, and go-to-market teams to keep billing data accurate, auditable, and compliant, and to expand payment method coverage and optimize authorization rates globally.
• Build internal tooling that empowers Support and Finance to diagnose and resolve billing issues quickly.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Direct experience building or scaling billing, payments, subscription, or monetization systems.
• Deep familiarity with payment processors (Stripe, Square, etc.), including subscriptions, invoicing, disputes, refunds, and webhooks.
• Demonstrated experience and appetite for building in-house billing solutions that rival leading best-in-class buy options.
• Strong backend engineering skills in Python with the ability to reason about complex distributed systems.
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and making data-informed decisions to prioritize work.
• Strong product judgment, you translate user and stakeholder problems into simple, effective technical solutions.
• Self-motivated with strong ownership instincts, you ship major features ahead of schedule and drive improvements without asking for permission.
• Track record of cross-functional collaboration with Finance, Support, or Growth stakeholders.
• Genuine interest and adoption of AI products and willingness to learn quickly.

Nice to Have

• 2+ years of hands-on experience with the Stripe APIs and SDKs.
• Experience with usage-based or metered billing models, especially metering agent actions, tokens, or other non-traditional units.
• Experience with Apple and Google Play in-app purchase billing.
• Familiarity with growth experimentation and PLG/self-serve SaaS monetization.
• Experience building platform constructs that support pricing experiments and A/B testing.
• Full-stack experience (our frontend is Next.js/React/TypeScript).
• Experience in a regulatory or compliance-heavy billing environment.
• Time spent at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team.

Tech Stack: Python | Go | Stripe | PostgreSQL | AWS | Docker