Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022 and growing rapidly as one of the world’s leading AI platforms. Perplexity has raised over $1B in venture investment from some of the world’s most visionary and successful leaders, including Elad Gil, Daniel Gross, Jeff Bezos, Accel, IVP, NEA, NVIDIA, Samsung, and many more. Our objective is to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making for people and assistive AI wherever decisions are being made. Throughout human history, change and innovation have always been driven by curious people. Today, curious people use Perplexity to answer more than 780 million queries every month–a number that’s growing rapidly for one simple reason: everyone can be curious.
Perplexity is seeking an experienced Infrastructure Capacity Engineer to own our infrastructure scaling, capacity planning, and resource optimization across our AI/ML infrastructure. The ideal candidate will have deep experience in large-scale distributed systems, capacity modeling, and infrastructure efficiency optimization to support our rapidly growing AI products and user base.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement comprehensive capacity planning models and forecasting systems that predict infrastructure needs across compute, storage, and network resources for our AI/ML workloads
- Build and maintain automated capacity management systems that dynamically scale our infrastructure based on real-time demand patterns and usage forecasts
- Lead cross-functional capacity planning initiatives including hardware procurement, data center expansion, and cloud resource optimization
- Develop sophisticated monitoring and alerting systems that provide early warning indicators for capacity constraints and performance degradation
- Create and maintain detailed infrastructure capacity models that account for seasonal patterns, product launches, and scaling efficiency across different workload types
- Optimize resource utilization and cost efficiency through advanced placement algorithms, load balancing strategies, and infrastructure rightsizing
- Design and implement disaster recovery and business continuity plans that ensure service availability during infrastructure failures or capacity emergencies
- Collaborate with Site Reliability Engineering and Platform teams to establish capacity-aware deployment strategies and infrastructure automation
- Play a leading role in defining the capacity engineering discipline within Perplexity’s engineering organization
Qualifications
- Minimum of 4+ years of experience in infrastructure capacity planning, systems engineering, or related technical roles at scale
- Proven experience managing infrastructure capacity for high-growth technology companies, preferably with AI/ML workloads or real-time systems
- Strong background in distributed systems architecture, cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Experience with capacity modeling tools, forecasting methodologies, and statistical analysis for infrastructure planning
- Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, Go, or similar for automation and tooling development
- Deep understanding of infrastructure monitoring, observability, and performance optimization techniques
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure management
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to make data-driven decisions under uncertainty
- Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills and experience working with engineering, product, and business stakeholders
- Experience with large-scale database systems, caching layers, and content delivery networks preferred
- Background in AI/ML infrastructure, LLM inference, GPU cluster management, or high-performance computing is a plus
Our cash compensation range for this role is $225,000 - $300,000.
