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Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Multimodal) at Perplexity · LumiJobs

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Perplexity· Posted 2026-07-05

Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Multimodal)

San Franciscofull timeOn Site

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senior

$220k–$405k

H1B: yes

Perplexity Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Multimodal) at Perplexity designs and scales backend distributed systems for realtime voice sessions. The role involves building session-worker architecture, streaming protocols, and orchestration layers for voice and multimodal AI products.

Responsibilities

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.

Qualification

Strong experience in RustExperience with realtime media systemsExperience integrating LLMsExperience with agent frameworksLearnBuild

Required

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.

Preferred

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.
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.