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Member of Technical Staff (Site Reliability Engineer, Crawler)

Perplexity

Skills

Required

  • Kubernetes
  • infrastructure as code
  • SRE / production engineering / infrastructure-heavy
  • backend
  • Python / C++ / Rust / Go
  • cloud infrastructure
  • Terraform
  • automated deployment workflows
  • Linux and networking
  • TCP/IP
  • DNS
  • TLS
  • HTTP
  • Datadog / Prometheus / Grafana

Preferred

  • web crawlers / search infrastructure / browser fleets
  • distributed queues / backpressure / workload isolation / multi-region recovery
  • CI/CD pipelines

Keeping a crawler running is not the same as keeping it productive. Queues can grow while servers look healthy, and a small change can become a fleet-wide bottleneck. On Perplexity's Crawler team, you'll improve throughput, plan capacity, and build operational reliability through safer deployments, better observability, and durable fixes.

Responsibilities

  • Operate and optimize Kubernetes workloads and supporting infrastructure for crawler services, including fetching and rendering fleets.
  • Build and maintain infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines, with safe rollouts, validation, and fast rollback.
  • Define SLOs and build monitoring, alerting, and observability for availability, latency, throughput, and resource saturation.
  • Own capacity planning and resource efficiency; diagnose queue backlogs, network failures, and resource bottlenecks with service owners.
  • Participate in the team's on-call rotation, lead incident response, and turn blameless postmortems into durable reliability improvements.
  • Write production software to automate diagnosis and routine remediation, with validation and approval gates for high-impact actions.

Requirements

  • 5+ years of experience in SRE, production engineering, or infrastructure-heavy backend roles, with strong programming skills in Python, C++, Rust, or Go.
  • Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, production Kubernetes, infrastructure as code such as Terraform, and automated deployment workflows.
  • Strong Linux and networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, HTTP, and load balancing.
  • Experience building observability with tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana, and using SLOs to guide reliability improvements.
  • Proven experience diagnosing distributed-system failures, leading production incidents, and improving system performance or resource efficiency.

Preferred

  • Experience operating web crawlers, search infrastructure, or browser fleets at scale.
  • Experience with distributed queues, backpressure, workload isolation, or multi-region recovery.

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