Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Agent Capabilities)

at Perplexity AI

📍 New York City, United States
📍 San Francisco, United States

USD 220,000-405,000 per year

MIDDLE

✅ Hybrid

Used Tools & Technologies

Machine Learning

Required Skills & Competences
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.

TypeScript @ 3 Python @ 3 Distributed Systems @ 6 Data Science @ 3 Leadership @ 3 AWS @ 3 PostgreSQL @ 3 React @ 3 Technical Leadership @ 3 LLM @ 3 AI @ 3

Details

Perplexity's Capabilities team turns frontier AI breakthroughs into reusable product capabilities that enable agents and users to solve complex tasks. The role owns the billing platform for agent actions and sits at the intersection of frontier AI research, agent systems, platform engineering, and product innovation.

Tech Stack

Why Perplexity is different

Craftsmanship. We build high quality, tasteful products targeting both the AI native and AI curious.
Ownership. You identify the problem, design the solution and ship it.
Entrepreneurship. We think like founders, act with urgency, and hustle to deliver for each other and our users.
Scholarship. Work among highly talented peers, pursuing knowledge and truth, upleveling ourselves, our teams, and our products.
Partnership. We amplify each others' strengths, break down silos, and give selflessly to help our colleagues 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 both users and agents to compose increasingly sophisticated solutions for complex real-world tasks.
Own capabilities end-to-end, from user-facing products and interfaces to 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 closely with PM, Design, Data Science, Sales, Research to identify high-impact opportunities in both consumer and enterprise customer experiences, validate emerging capabilities, and translate complex agent behaviors into simple, reliable product experiences.
Set technical direction on ambiguous problems and raise the bar through design reviews, mentorship, and technical leadership.

Requirements

Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of owning and delivering complex products or systems from conception to 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 that serve high traffic and large user bases.
Strong product judgment and instincts; you turn vague needs into simple, reliable systems and ship without waiting for perfect specs.
Comfort with data-informed decisions; you define the metrics and evals that prove a system works, and iterate on them.
Experience designing abstractions, platforms, or reusable systems that enable other engineers, users, or automated systems to accomplish complex tasks.
Strong execution: you can take ambiguous product needs, break them down, and ship durable systems with clear user impact.
Genuine interest in frontier AI capabilities, agent systems, and excitement for rapidly exploring, evaluating, and productizing new model behaviors.

Nice to have

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

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.

Note: USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions. International salaries are set based on the local market.