Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Multimodal)

Details

Perplexity is hiring builders to join its Multimodal AI group, an industry-leading team defining the next generation of human-AI interaction. The team is creating experiences that move beyond the touch interface, allowing people to communicate with AI through voice, images, video, and new modalities.

As an engineer on the Multimodal AI team, you will work across the stack to build product experiences and platform systems across Perplexity applications. The stack spans immersive UIs, real-time audio processing, evaluation systems, backend infrastructure, supporting libraries, and SDKs. You will collaborate with the team to turn ambiguous, bleeding-edge problems into reliable user experiences.

Why Perplexity Is Different

• Craftsmanship: Build high-quality, tasteful products for AI-native and AI-curious users.
• Ownership: Identify problems, design solutions, and ship them.
• Entrepreneurship: Think like founders, act with urgency, and deliver for colleagues and users.
• Scholarship: Work with talented peers while pursuing knowledge and continuously improving teams and products.
• Partnership: Amplify colleagues' strengths, break down silos, and help deliver excellence.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own product and multimodal platform systems for Perplexity.
• Lead features, projects, and products end-to-end, from problem definition and technical design through implementation and launch.
• Continuously iterate to improve products and experiences for customers.
• Partner closely with engineers, product managers, designers, data scientists, and go-to-market teams.
• Build systems that account for the nuances of multimodal AI.
• Work closely with client verticals to integrate new features into their stacks.

Requirements

• Experience building and operating production systems at meaningful scale.
• Ability to work across the stack, from deep systems primitives to user interfaces and prompts.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions.
• Genuine interest in and adoption of multimodal AI products, with a willingness to learn quickly.
• Ability to reason through novel problems and implement scalable, long-term solutions.

Nice to Have

• Background in real-time audio or video processing.
• Experience with audio stack technologies, including audio processing modules (APMs), echo cancellation, noise reduction or cancellation, and automatic gain control (AGC).
• Experience with immersive UIs integrating real-time data.
• Familiarity with Rust or C++.

Mission

Perplexity's mission is to power curiosity. The company describes this mission as a continuous cycle of learning, building, integrating, and repeating: researching and questioning the status quo, creating solutions to problems, interacting with the world to drive adoption, and continuing the cycle.