Software Engineer - Acceleration
Used Tools & Technologies
Not specified
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.
Go @ 5
TypeScript @ 5
Python @ 5
Leadership @ 3
Rust @ 5
CUDA @ 2
- 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.
Details
Perplexity is seeking creative, AI-pilled engineers to join our Acceleration team. The company is reshaping the way people navigate the internet and the wider world. The Acceleration team's mandate is to continually uplevel the way the company and its teams operate, to deliver order-of-magnitude improvements in product and user experience.
Just as Perplexity is heralding an agentic future for the internet, you will ensure that the company makes the best use of AI tools and agents to multiply the leverage of lean, mission-focused teams. Today, Perplexity uses AI tools across everything it does, from frontend and backend engineering to applied AI research and business operations. Tomorrow’s AI technology will be even more capable, and the Acceleration team will lead both software and process engineering to harness AI so that the company can deliver at maximum velocity.
The ideal candidate will possess sound technical judgment forged in the trenches of internet-scale companies, paired with voracious use of today’s most advanced AI tools/models and a capacious imagination to rethink how work gets done in the leading companies of tomorrow. They should thrive in a hybrid role that marries facets of AI product development, infrastructure/platform engineering, developer experience, and more.
Note: this is an extremely technical and hands-on role. Strong vision and creativity is necessary but not sufficient for success. You will be expected to build both prototypes and production systems, as well as to reengineer codebases, infrastructure, processes, and anything else that must evolve to realize this vision.
Responsibilities
- Identify, prioritize, and execute on the highest-potential opportunities to accelerate Perplexity’s delivery cadence with frontier AI capabilities.
- Develop empathy for the nuances of technical and business teams’ work across disciplines and verticals, and collaborate with them to harness AI in new ways.
- Make codebases, systems, and knowledge stores legible to AI.
- Help the company triangulate toward the optimal point on the quality-velocity Pareto frontier, while shifting that frontier outward with AI tools and agents.
- Keep abreast of new AI tools/models and make maximally effective use of them in your own work, setting an example across the company and inspiring others to do the same.
- Help the company make high-conviction bets on specific technologies in situations where indecision is a comfortable and tempting default.
- Work with engineering leadership, recruiting, and others to instill an AI-forward culture and select for those who will thrive in such an environment.
Requirements
- 4 to 20+ years of industry experience, ideally with a substantial portion focused on infrastructure/platform engineering or developer acceleration in environments featuring significant technical complexity.
- Daily use of AI models/tools, along with strong intuition on their jagged frontiers.
- Proficiency with Python, along with experience and/or desire to learn more about Rust, TypeScript, Go, and other languages.
- Strong understanding of (and empathy for) the work of technical staff across disciplines, along with an enthusiasm to learn about the work of business and operations teams.
- Broad working knowledge of the typical stacks used by AI product & applied research companies (for example: familiarity with what CUDA is and when/where/why it’s used).
- An obsession with improving the legibility of (and reducing brittleness in) both software and human-orchestrated processes.
- Experience navigating exploration-exploitation tradeoffs, balancing the need to ship today with the need to build capacity for tomorrow.
Benefits
- Compensation range (U.S.): $250K - $385K. Offers equity.
- U.S. benefits: full-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive 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.