Engineering Manager (TLM, Agents)

Details

Perplexity is seeking a TLM (Tech Lead Manager) to lead and grow its Agents engineering team. The team consists of AI/ML, backend, and full-stack engineers building agentic experiences within the Comet ecosystem. The team aims to empower users with AI agents that can faithfully actualize their intent through open-ended interactions with the world.

The role combines AI expertise, product intuition, and engineering management skills to advance the capabilities of AI agents for millions of users. Key areas include designing agents that navigate the digital world, training action and decision models, supporting desktop, mobile, and headless cloud environments, developing secure-by-design agentic capabilities, and designing 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 models, infrastructure, and browser technologies.
• Scale AI capabilities for a rapidly growing user base.
• Guide system architectures and product roadmaps using strong technical and product intuition.
• Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance.
• 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 in the AI industry.

Requirements

• Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack.
• Proficiency in Python; TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust are a bonus.
• Domain expertise 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, including CDP, Playwright, and extension development.
• Strong product intuition and a commitment to user experience excellence.
• Strong background and hands-on technical experience with frontier models, especially those relevant to open-world agents.
• 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 benefits including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care accounts. Final offer amounts vary based on experience and expertise.