Azure Platform Engineer

ABOUT PERPLEXITY

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.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a Staff Data Platform Engineer to lead the strategic migration of our core data workloads to Azure Cosmos DB. You will be the primary architect responsible for moving high-volume, mission-critical data from our existing legacy infrastructure into a globally distributed Cosmos DB environment. This isn't just about moving data; it’s about redesigning our data layer to support the next 100x growth of our AI platform. You will own the migration lifecycle—from schema redesign and cutover strategy to performance tuning at scale.

This is a high-impact, senior/staff-level role where you will shape architecture, set standards, and drive long-term technical direction for Perplexity’s data ecosystem.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

LEAD THE COSMOS DB MIGRATION

- Migration Strategy: Design and execute zero-downtime migration paths from legacy databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or others) to Cosmos DB.

- Architectural Redesign: Lead the "lift and shift" vs. "refactor" decision-making process. You will redesign relational or legacy NoSQL schemas into optimized, partitioned Cosmos DB models.

- Tooling & Automation: Build or implement data migration pipelines (using Azure Data Factory, Change Data Capture, or custom Spark jobs) to ensure data integrity and consistency during the transition.

- Validation & Cutover: Establish rigorous testing frameworks to validate data parity, latency benchmarks, and failover reliability before final cutover.

COSMOS DB OPERATIONS & SCALE

- RU Optimization: Post-migration, you will be responsible for tuning Request Units (RUs) and indexing policies to ensure the new system is more cost-effective and performant than the old.

- Partitioning Mastery: Implement complex partitioning strategies (including hierarchical partitioning) to eliminate hot spots in our most high-traffic collections.

- Global Distribution: Configure multi-region write capabilities to ensure Perplexity users have sub-10ms latency regardless of their location.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of leading large-scale database migrations.

- Cosmos DB Specialist: Prior experience operating cosmos DB at scale.

- Migration Experience: You have successfully moved production workloads with zero or near-zero downtime at a previous high-growth company.

- Systems Expert: Strong understanding of distributed systems, CAP theorem, and how to manage data consistency across a migration boundary (e.g., dual-writing, shadow reads).

- Backend Proficiency: Strong coding skills in Python, Go, or TypeScript, with the ability to build custom migration scripts and service-level abstractions.