Member Of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Acceleration)

Details

About Perplexity AI

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine built to serve the world’s curiosity with fast, trustworthy answers grounded in the live web and backed by clear citations. It combines multiple leading models with real-time search to synthesize up-to-date, source-linked responses instead of traditional search results. Perplexity is also rolling out Computer, a general-purpose AI worker that can use software like a human to research, build, and execute end-to-end workflows for users.

About the Role

Perplexity is seeking creative engineers to join its Acceleration team. The team’s mandate is to continually improve how the company and its teams operate, delivering order-of-magnitude improvements in product and user experience.

The Acceleration team will lead software and process engineering to harness AI tools and agents, enabling lean, mission-focused teams to operate at maximum velocity. The role combines aspects of AI product development, infrastructure and platform engineering, developer experience, and related areas.

This is an extremely technical and hands-on role. The successful candidate will build prototypes and production systems, as well as reengineer codebases, infrastructure, processes, and anything else required to realize the team’s vision.

Responsibilities

• Identify, prioritize, and execute on high-potential opportunities to accelerate Perplexity’s delivery cadence using frontier AI capabilities.
• Develop empathy for the work of technical and business teams across disciplines and collaborate with them to harness AI in new ways.
• Make codebases, systems, and knowledge stores more legible to AI.
• Help the company optimize the balance between quality and velocity while using AI tools and agents to improve both.
• Keep up with new AI tools and models and use them effectively in daily work, setting an example across the company.
• Help the company make high-conviction technology decisions.
• Work with engineering leadership, recruiting, and other teams to establish an AI-forward culture.
• Build prototypes and production systems and reengineer codebases, infrastructure, and processes as needed.

Requirements

• 5 to 15+ years of industry experience, ideally including substantial infrastructure, platform engineering, or developer acceleration experience in technically complex environments.
• Daily use of AI models and tools, with strong intuition regarding their capabilities and limitations.
• Proficiency with Python and experience with, or interest in learning, Rust, TypeScript, Go, and other programming languages.
• Strong understanding of and empathy for the work of technical staff across disciplines, together with enthusiasm for learning about business and operations teams.
• Broad working knowledge of typical technology stacks used by AI product and applied research companies.
• Familiarity with CUDA, including understanding what it is and when, where, and why it is used; hand-rolling CUDA kernels is not required.
• A focus on improving the legibility of and reducing brittleness in software and human-orchestrated processes.
• Experience navigating exploration-exploitation tradeoffs and balancing immediate delivery with building future capacity.

Applicants are encouraged to apply even if their experience does not match every listed qualification.

Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees receive benefits including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care accounts. International employees receive benefits tailored to their region of residence.