[Hiring] Member of Technical Staff (Site Reliability Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure) @Perplexity

Role Description

Perplexity serves hundreds of millions of queries a month. Every answer, every Perplexity Computer task, and every enterprise deployment runs on production infrastructure owned by the Cloud Infrastructure team.

• Own production at scale.
• Run the compute, networking, and storage foundation behind Perplexity's consumer, Computer, API, and enterprise products, and own its availability, latency, and cost.
• Run our Kubernetes fleet.
• Operate and upgrade the EKS clusters that host web services, search, datastores, and secure sandboxes.
• Tune scheduling, autoscaling, node lifecycle, DNS, and service networking so clusters stay healthy under bursty, fast-growing load.
• Engineer the network.
• Design and operate VPC architectures, Transit Gateway and PrivateLink connectivity, load balancing, DNS, and egress across accounts, regions, and cloud providers.
• Keep data durable and fast.
• Own the storage layer (EBS, S3, DynamoDB, and the managed databases and caches our services depend on), including performance, durability, backups, and restores that have actually been tested.
• Manage everything as code.
• Run infrastructure through Terraform and CI/CD.
• Build reusable modules and guardrails, and make every change reviewable, repeatable, and safe to roll back.
• Prepare for failures.
• Define SLOs, build alerts that someone can act on, design for zone and regional failure, and run game days and disaster-recovery exercises that prove recovery works.
• Lead incident response.
• Be on the critical path when things break.
• Drive incidents to resolution, write blameless postmortems, and land the fixes so the same failure never pages anyone twice.
• Scale ahead of demand.
• Own capacity planning, quotas, reservations, and cost efficiency so product launches and traffic spikes never wait on infrastructure.
• Automate away the toil.
• Build tooling, increasingly agent-driven, that turns provisioning, upgrades, and remediation into self-serve, hands-off workflows for every engineering team.

Qualifications

• Deep AWS expertise: VPC, IAM, EC2, EKS, ELB, Route 53, S3, EBS, etc.
• Production Kubernetes at scale: cluster upgrades, CNI, CoreDNS, autoscalers like Karpenter, and debugging a misbehaving node.
• Terraform mastery: designed module structures, managed state across many accounts.
• Strong networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, routing).
• Proficient in Python, Go, or Rust for automation, tooling, and controllers.
• Fluency with observability tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana.
• A track record of leading production incidents and turning root-cause analysis into durable fixes.
• Ability to own problems end-to-end and navigate ambiguous paths.

Requirements

• Multi-region active-active or failover architectures, and disaster-recovery programs with real recovery targets.
• Experience with proxies, service meshes, and kernel-level networking: Envoy, Istio, Cilium, or eBPF.
• Knowledge of GitOps and progressive delivery: Argo CD, Flux, or similar.
• Experience in enterprise and compliance environments: single-tenant or BYOC deployments, KMS/BYOK, SOC 2 or similar controls.
• Experience running stateful systems in production: Postgres, Redis, or search engines like Vespa or Elasticsearch.
• Multi-cloud or neocloud operations (GCP, CoreWeave, or similar).
• FinOps: cost attribution, Savings Plans and reservations, and making infrastructure cheaper without making it fragile.