Member Of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Agent Capabilities)

Details

Perplexity's Capabilities team operates at the intersection of frontier AI research and product innovation, turning emerging model capabilities into reliable, production-grade experiences for users and agents. The role involves building foundations for agentic AI products, including capabilities related to reasoning, planning, memory, learning, and agent collaboration.

Tech Stack: Python, Go, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, AWS, TypeScript, React

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 improving teams and products.
• Partnership: Amplify colleagues' strengths, break down silos, and help deliver excellence.

Responsibilities

• Investigate emerging frontier-model behaviors and identify opportunities to turn them into product capabilities.
• Help define how advances in reasoning, planning, memory, learning, and agent collaboration appear in the product.
• Build and evolve Skills, Workflows, and Artifacts into a coherent ecosystem.
• Shape the architecture, abstractions, and product experiences that enable users and agents to compose sophisticated solutions for complex real-world tasks.
• Own capabilities end-to-end, including user-facing products and interfaces, backend services, evaluation, data models, and production operations.
• Build scalable platform infrastructure and backend systems that power capability execution, sharing, and lifecycle management across high-volume user and agent interactions.
• Collaborate with Product Management, Design, Data Science, Sales, and Research to identify high-impact opportunities in consumer and enterprise experiences, validate emerging capabilities, and translate complex agent behaviors into simple, reliable product experiences.
• Set technical direction on ambiguous problems and raise engineering standards through design reviews, mentorship, and technical leadership.

Requirements

• Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a record of owning and delivering complex products or systems from conception through production. Exceptional candidates with less experience and an outstanding record of impact are encouraged to apply.
• Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals, including experience building user-facing products, backend services, and scalable distributed systems serving high traffic and large user bases.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to turn vague needs into simple, reliable systems and ship without waiting for perfect specifications.
• Comfort with data-informed decisions, including defining metrics and evaluations to demonstrate that a system works and iterating on them.
• Experience designing abstractions, platforms, or reusable systems that enable engineers, users, or automated systems to accomplish complex tasks.
• Strong execution skills, including the ability to break down ambiguous product needs and ship durable systems with clear user impact.
• Genuine interest in frontier AI capabilities and agent systems, with enthusiasm for exploring, evaluating, and productizing new model behaviors.

Nice To Have

• Experience building agentic systems, including tool calling, subagents, and long-running or autonomous task execution.
• Experience building developer platforms or reusable-capability primitives such as SDKs, plugin systems, or workflow engines.
• Experience with evaluation, benchmarking, or quality systems for ML- or LLM-powered products.
• Experience at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team.

Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees receive benefits including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more. Benefits for international employees are tailored to their region of residence. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; final offers depend on factors including experience and expertise.