Software Engineer - Agent Infra

Details

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022 and growing rapidly as one of the world’s leading AI platforms. Perplexity has raised over $1B in venture investment and aims to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making and assistive AI. The role focuses on building the core infrastructure that powers agentic products across Perplexity, including Search, Deep Research, and the Comet browser.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement a highly reliable and scalable agent runtime: orchestration, shared state and memory, tool calling interfaces, and scheduling for cost, latency, and quality.
• Build secure sandboxed execution for agent actions and code; optimize cold start, isolation, and observability.
• Ship unified interfaces for multiple model sizes and providers. Integrate with open tool ecosystems such as MCP-style connectors for data and actions.
• Develop an evaluation platform for online and offline assessments, A/B tests, safety checks, and regression gates to improve agent reliability over time.
• Partner with Research, Inference, and Search to land new agent capabilities end to end, from prototype to production.

Requirements

• 6+ years of industry experience building large scale systems or platforms.
• Experience building agent applications with tool calling, context engineering, or open connector integrations.
• Strong coding skills in one or more of: Python, Java, Go. Comfortable with service design, APIs, and data models for high throughput systems.
• Working knowledge of containers, virtualization, and sandboxing. Familiar with metrics, tracing, on-call, and incident practices.
• Bias to own problems across layers, collaborate in fast moving teams, and ship.

Nice to have

• Prior work on agent orchestration pipelines: task routing, planning, memory graphs, vector search, or browser automation.
• Experience with evaluations, preference optimization, or RL to improve agent reliability.
• Exposure to MCP or similar open protocols for tool and data connectivity.
• Security hardening for multi-tenant workloads, snapshotting, or untrusted code execution.

Compensation & Benefits

• Cash compensation range: $200,000 - $300,000 per year. Final offers determined by experience and expertise.
• Equity may be part of the total compensation package.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents. Includes a 401(k) plan.