Engineering Manager (TLM, Agents)

at Perplexity AI

📍 San Francisco, United States

USD 300,000-405,000 per year

MIDDLE

✅ On-site

Used Tools & Technologies

Machine Learning

Required Skills & Competences
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.

Go @ 1 Playwright @ 3 TypeScript @ 1 Python @ 1 Hiring @ 3 Leadership @ 3 Prioritization @ 6 Rust @ 1 CDP @ 3 Technical Leadership @ 3 AI @ 3 Reinforcement Learning @ 3

Details

Perplexity is seeking a TLM (Tech Lead Manager) to lead and grow the Agents engineering team. The Agents team consists of AI/ML, backend, and full-stack engineers who collaborate to build agentic experiences within the Comet ecosystem. The role focuses on advancing agent capabilities to faithfully actualize user intent across desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other environments.

Responsibilities

Provide technical leadership 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 capability and scale for a rapidly growing user base.
Exercise sharp technical and product intuition to guide system architectures and product roadmaps.
Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance for 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 company co-founders to deliver strategic objectives that redefine what’s possible in the AI industry.
Solve open problems including designing agents that navigate the digital world, training action and decision models for complex multimodal states, creating permission architectures and payload classifiers, designing data representations, and providing consistent cross-platform experiences.

Requirements

Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack and hands-on technical experience with frontier models (particularly relevant to open-world agents).
Proficiency in Python (bonus: TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
Domain expertise in at least one of:
- 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.
Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects; ability to guide highly-opinionated teams in making tradeoffs and prioritization decisions.
Experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting, growing, and retaining talent.
8+ years of engineering experience, with 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, and more.
Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region of residence.
USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set based on the local market.

Compensation

Salary range (U.S.): $300,000 - $405,000 per year. Offers equity.