Engineering Manager (Agent Engine)

USD 300,000-485,000 per year

MIDDLE

✅ On-site

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI @ 2 API @ 3 CDP @ 3 Go @ 5 Playwright @ 3 Prioritization @ 3 Python @ 5 Reinforcement Learning @ 3 Rust @ 5 Technical Leadership TypeScript @ 5

Details

Perplexity is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead and grow the Agent Engine team. The team designs and builds agentic experiences, including Perplexity Computer, the Comet ecosystem, and the Agent API. The role focuses on advancing frontier intelligence systems and solving open problems in AI for millions of users.

The team works on frontier agent harnesses and systems for high-stakes, mission-critical work; action and decision models for complex multimodal states; execution across local, headless cloud, and custom environments; permission architectures and payload classifiers for secure-by-design agent capabilities; and data representations and interaction modes between agents and their environments.

Responsibilities

Provide technical leadership across multiple layers of a rapidly growing AI agents product.
Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI systems and related technologies to advance capability frontiers and scale them for a rapidly growing user base.
Use technical and product intuition to guide system architectures and product roadmaps.
Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the broader team.
Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a rapidly growing team.
Develop rigorous interview pipelines and work closely with recruiting to source candidates.
Interface with Perplexity co-founders to deliver strategic objectives that redefine what is possible in the AI industry.

Requirements

Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.
Proficiency in Python; TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust are additional advantages.
Domain knowledge in at least one of the following areas:
- Harness engineering
- Agent skills and plugin architectures
- Model training and reinforcement learning
- Browser technologies, including CDP, Playwright, and extension development
Strong technical intuition and a focus on user experience excellence.
Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects.
Ability to guide highly opinionated teams in making sound trade-offs and prioritization decisions.
Experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent.
8+ years of engineering experience, including at least 3 years as an engineering manager.

Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care accounts. Benefits for international employees are tailored to their region of residence.