Engineering Manager (API Platform)

Details

Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration. The API Platform brings these technologies to developers through elegant, scalable APIs. The platform serves thousands of customers, including startups, enterprises, and governments, and supports distributed systems, large-scale knowledge indexes, agent runtimes, retrieval, and orchestration.

This role will lead the API Platform engineering team through rapid growth, designing and scaling programmatic interfaces for frontier intelligence. The team works across distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and emerging AI technologies while prioritizing developer and agent experience.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical and team leadership across multiple layers of the API business.
• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide customers with building blocks for frontier intelligence.
• Anticipate future customer needs and develop architectures that support them while serving current workloads.
• Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the team.
• Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a rapidly growing team.
• Develop rigorous interview pipelines and collaborate with recruiting to source candidates.
• Collaborate across teams to incorporate new frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customers.
• Track and ensure progress toward business goals in coordination with engineering and business executives.

Requirements

• Entrepreneurial attitude and willingness to operate beyond traditional engineering responsibilities.
• Proficiency in Python; Go and/or Rust experience is a bonus.
• Strong understanding of high-traffic API design, including schema evolution and versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
• Experience with modern AI APIs, including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, and emerging technical standards, is a strong plus.
• Strong customer empathy and product sense, with a focus on building ergonomic, well-documented APIs that are easy for developers and agents to adopt.
• 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.
• At least 8 years of engineering experience, including at least 3 years as an engineering manager.

Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees receive comprehensive benefits including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care accounts. Final offer amounts are determined by experience and expertise and may vary from the listed range.