Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Multimodal)

• The Multimodal team builds the experiences and infrastructure that move AI interaction beyond touch and text — realtime voice, vision, and the platform systems behind them. We own the full path from a user speaking into a device to an answer coming back: the realtime session infrastructure that connects clients to frontier audio models, the backend orchestration that routes, records, and supervises live sessions, and the SDK that powers voice and multimodal experiences across Perplexity’s apps
• As a backend engineer on Multimodal, you will design and scale the distributed systems that carry live voice sessions in production — and drive entirely new products at the intersection of voice, vision, and agents
• 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

Preferred experience

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend or distributed systems
• Genuine interest and adoption of AI products and willingness to learn quickly
• Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions
• 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
• 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