Engineering Manager (TLM, Agents)

USD 300,000-405,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ 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 @ 4 CDP @ 6 Engineering Management Go @ 6 Machine Learning Playwright @ 6 Prioritization @ 6 Python @ 6 Reinforcement Learning @ 6 Rust @ 6 Technical Leadership TypeScript @ 6

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 who collaborate to build agentic experiences within the Comet ecosystem. The goal is to empower users with AI agents that can faithfully actualize their intent through open-ended interactions with the world.

As the Agents TLM, you will bring AI expertise, product intuition, and engineering management skills to advance the capabilities of agents for millions of users. The team is working on designing AI agents that navigate the digital world, training action and decision models based on complex multimodal states, supporting desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other 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 to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities 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 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 Perplexity co-founders to deliver strategic objectives that redefine what is possible in the AI industry.

Requirements

Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack.
Proficiency in Python; TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust are beneficial.
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 focus on user experience excellence.
Strong background and hands-on technical experience with frontier models, particularly models 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 a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.