Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agent Engine)

at Perplexity AI

📍 San Francisco, United States

USD 250,000-405,000 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 @ 1 Playwright @ 3 Python @ 1 Reinforcement Learning @ 3 Rust @ 1 TypeScript @ 1

Details

Perplexity is seeking energetic engineers to join its Agent Engine team. The team designs and builds agentic experiences, including Perplexity Computer, the Comet ecosystem, the Agent API, and other frontier intelligence systems.

Engineers work across engineering and applied research to advance what agents can accomplish for users and solve open problems in AI.

Responsibilities

Design frontier agent harnesses and systems for high-stakes, mission-critical work.
Leverage action and decision models that determine how to accomplish user-specified objectives based on complex multimodal states.
Provide consistently excellent experiences across local execution, headless cloud, custom executors, and other environments through sound system design and flexible abstractions.
Develop permission architectures, payload classifiers, and other methods for secure-by-design agentic capabilities.
Design optimal data representations and modes of interaction between agents and their environments.
Collaborate across engineering and applied research in a small, fast-moving team.

Requirements

Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.
Proficiency in Python; TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust are a bonus.
Significant experience 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, or extension development
Strong technical intuition and a taste for user experience excellence.
Comfort working with a small, fast-moving team and a bias toward ownership.
Passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.

Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care accounts. International employees receive a benefits program tailored to their region of residence. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise.