Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agents)

Perplexity
San Francisco, US

Who this role is best for

Aimed at senior AI engineers who thrive in fast-moving teams and have strong product intuition for user-facing AI agents.

Best fit for

  • AI engineers with experience in multimodal model training and reinforcement learning.
    — “Post-training and reinforcement learning (particularly for multimodal models)
  • Developers comfortable working across browser technologies and AI model interfaces.
    — “Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
  • Engineers who prioritize both technical excellence and delightful user experiences.
    — “Ensure a high craft and quality bar, in both AI agent performance and user experience

Things to consider

  • Expect to work across multiple layers of AI product development simultaneously.
    — “Drive cutting-edge AI capabilities across multiple layers
  • Must be comfortable with rapid scaling challenges for a growing userbase.
    — “scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase

How to stand out

  • Showcase specific examples of context engineering for AI tool interfaces.
    — “Context engineering and tool interfaces for frontier AI models
  • Demonstrate experience shipping AI products with measurable user delight.
    — “A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight
  • Highlight cross-functional collaboration with designers and product managers.
    — “Collaborate with fellow engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · CompanyLevel · Senior

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • advanced AI capabilities
  • positive user feedback
Typical background
AI engineeringsoftware development

Skills & requirements

Required

AI ExpertiseProduct IntuitionMultimodal State UnderstandingUser Experience Design

Preferred

PythonTypeScriptGoRust

Stack & domain

AISoftware EngineeringPythonTypeScriptGoRustProduct IntuitionUser ExperienceTeamworkSoftware Development

About the role

Original posting from Perplexity via Ashby

Perplexity is seeking energetic engineers to join our highly driven Agents engineering team. The Agents team consists of backend, full-stack, and AI/ML engineers who collaborate to build delightful agentic experiences within our Comet ecosystem https://www.perplexity.ai/comet and Perplexity Computer https://www.perplexity.ai/computer, our platform for generalized frontier intelligence. Our vision is to empower our users with AI agents that can faithfully actualize their intent, however and wherever expressed, through open-ended interactions with the world.

As an engineer on our Agents team, you will bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and a tinkerer's mindset to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users. You will work across applied research and engineering to solve many open problems in AI, including:

  • Designing AI agents to navigate the digital world and perform increasingly valuable units of work for our users;
  • Training action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives;
  • Providing consistently excellent experiences across desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other environments through flexible abstractions and frictionless backgrounding;
  • Developing permission architectures, payload classifiers, and other methods to implement secure-by-design agentic capabilities;
  • Designing optimal data representations and modes of interaction between agents and their environments;
  • and much, much more.

RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Drive cutting-edge AI capabilities across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space.
  • Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI models, infrastructure, and browser technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase.
  • Ensure a high craft and quality bar, in both AI agent performance and user experience.
  • Collaborate with fellow engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists, and others across the company to integrate core Perplexity functionality into our frontier agentic products and vice-versa.
  • Contribute to product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the broader team.

QUALIFICATIONS

  • Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack.
  • Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
  • Significant experience in at least one of the following areas:
  • Context engineering and tool interfaces for frontier AI models
  • Post-training and reinforcement learning (particularly for multimodal models)
  • Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
  • Strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
  • Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team, must be willing to dive in and take ownership.
  • A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.

Source: Perplexity careers (Ashby)

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