Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Multimodal)

Details

Perplexity is hiring builders to join our Multimodal AI group, an industry-leading team defining the next generation of human-AI interaction. The team creates experiences that move beyond the touch interface, allowing people to communicate with AI through voice, images, video, or new modalities. As an engineer on the Multimodal AI team, you will work across the stack to build product experiences and platform systems that make this possible across Perplexity's applications. The stack spans immersive UIs, realtime audio processing, evaluation systems, backend infrastructure, and supporting libraries and SDKs. The team matches engineers' strengths and interests to areas where they can drive impact and collaborates to turn ambiguous, bleeding-edge problems into reliable experiences for users.

Why Perplexity is Different

• Craftsmanship: build high quality, tasteful products targeting both AI native and AI curious users.
• Ownership: identify the problem, design the solution and ship it.
• Entrepreneurship: think like founders, act with urgency, and hustle to deliver for each other and users.
• Scholarship: work among highly talented peers, pursue knowledge and truth, and uplevel teams and products.
• Partnership: amplify each others' strengths, break down silos, and give selflessly to help colleagues 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 to technical design, implementation, and launch.
• Hill climb on hard problems, continuously iterating to improve for customers and the team.
• Partner closely with engineers, product managers, designers, data scientists, and go-to-market teams.
• Build systems that take into account the nuances of multimodal AI.
• Work closely with client verticals to integrate new features into their stack.

Requirements

• Experience building and operating production systems at a meaningful scale.
• Ability to work up and down the stack, from deep systems primitives to getting the pixels and prompts just right.
• Strong product judgment and ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions.
• Genuine interest in and adoption of multimodal AI products and willingness to learn quickly.
• Ability to think through novel problems and implement companion long-term solutions that scale.

Nice to have

• Background including work with realtime audio or video processing.
• Experience with audio stack technologies including audio processing modules (APMs), echo cancellation, noise reduction/cancellation, automatic-gain control (AGC), etc.
• Experience with immersive UIs integrating with realtime data.
• Some experience or familiarity with Rust or C++.

Our Mission

Perplexity's mission is to power curiosity. Curious people drive change through a continuous cycle of learning, building, and integrating.

• Learn: constantly learn new things by asking more; research is essential.
• Build: make and create things to show the world new answers to problems.
• Integrate: interact with the world to drive change and adoption.
• Repeat: this cycle never ends for curious people.

Benefits

• U.S. Benefits: Full-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.
• International Benefits: Full-time employees outside the U.S. enjoy 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.)