Member of Technical Staff (Site Reliability Engineer, Crawler)

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.

Qualifications

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.

Nice to have

Experience operating web crawlers, search infrastructure, or browser fleets at scale.

Experience with distributed queues, backpressure, workload isolation, or multi-region recovery.