Member of Technical Staff (TPM, Compute)

Details

Perplexity is looking for a technical program manager to own how the company plans, brings online, and operates the GPU compute behind every product. Perplexity serves Ask, Computer, and API traffic on GPU capacity across multiple cloud and neocloud providers, with demand changing alongside customer growth, product launches, and model releases. This role works across engineering, research, Finance, and providers to forecast compute needs, bring new capacity into production, and improve fleet reliability, utilization, and cost efficiency.

Our Mission

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

Responsibilities

• Partner with Finance on compute demand forecasts three to twelve months ahead, based on customer growth, model releases, and post-training and evaluation plans.
• Turn forecasts into capacity commitments and budget decisions with Finance and engineering leadership, ensuring new capacity fits the plan before commitments are made.
• Bring new capacity online and lead transitions from contract to production, including provider onboarding, acceptance criteria, migration, and decommissioning.
• Build a trusted view of the fleet covering capacity, cost, allocation, uptime, reliability, and utilization by provider and workload.
• Drive utilization, reliability, and cost-efficiency, reclaiming idle capacity and surfacing trade-offs.
• Own inference and compute requests end to end, including triage and resolution of GPU, deployment, and quota requests, while building self-service paths for routine requests.
• Manage compute provider relationships through scorecards and regular reviews of reliability, support, and delivery.
• Partner with engineering, research, and Finance on capacity decisions for training, batch inference, and real-time production inference.
• Build the operating system for compute, including processes and tooling to request, plan, allocate, and track compute with clear ownership.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience in technical program management, capacity planning, or infrastructure operations in cloud environments, leading programs across teams and vendors.
• Direct experience with GPU or accelerator fleets supporting training and inference workloads.
• Experience working with cloud or neocloud providers on reserved capacity, capacity commitments, onboarding, or vendor performance management.
• Experience with infrastructure cost modeling, unit economics, or cost attribution in partnership with Finance.
• Technical depth in cluster management, scheduling, and orchestration.
• Data skills sufficient to build forecasts and dashboards independently.
• Ability to identify difficult trade-offs and communicate them clearly to engineers and executives.
• Initiative and ownership in a small, agile team with limited precedent.

Benefits

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