The Data Platform team owns the end-to-end data lifecycle at Perplexity, from ingestion through processing, storage, and serving, powering product features, analytics, experimentation, AI workloads, and the company’s data lake
The team defines the architecture for batch and streaming systems, the orchestration and observability stack, and a self-serve data platform, while thoughtfully combining platforms such as Databricks and Snowflake with open-source technologies including Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Dagster, dbt, Iceberg, Delta Lake, and ClickHouse
In this senior/staff role, you will shape architecture, set standards, and drive the long-term technical direction of Perplexity’s data ecosystem
Design and operate large-scale batch and streaming data pipelines that directly power Perplexity product features, AI training and evaluation workflows, analytics, and experimentation
Build event-driven and streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, PubSub, or similar) for real-time ingestion, transformation, and delivery, alongside batch frameworks for backfills, aggregations, and offline computation
Lead the architecture of data orchestration using tools like Airflow or Dagster, owning scheduling, dependency management, retries, SLAs, and end-to-end observability for critical data flows
Set and enforce guarantees for data correctness, freshness, lineage, and recoverability, designing systems that handle rapid scale growth, partial failures, and evolving schemas without disrupting AI workloads or product experiences
Build self-serve data platforms that let engineers, data scientists, and analysts safely discover data, define contracts, and create and operate their own pipelines with minimal friction
Improve developer experience through better abstractions, opinionated paved paths, and standards for data modeling, testing, validation, and deployment, treating the data platform as a product used by many teams
Drive architectural decisions across storage, compute, orchestration, and data APIs, partnering closely with product engineering and data science to align the data ecosystem with Perplexity’s roadmap
Mentor engineers, review designs, and raise the technical bar for data infrastructure through thoughtful feedback, documentation, and hands-on collaboration