Tech Lead - Acceleration

Details

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022. The company is focused on building accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making and assistive AI across many domains. Perplexity serves hundreds of millions of queries per month and is rapidly expanding its platform and teams.

This role is the founding Tech Lead for the Acceleration team. The team will lead software and process engineering efforts to harness state-of-the-art AI tools and agents to multiply the leverage of Perplexity’s teams, increasing delivery velocity while maintaining high quality. The role is highly technical and hands-on, combining AI product development, infrastructure/platform engineering, and developer experience improvements.

Locations: New York City; Palo Alto; San Francisco.

Responsibilities

• Identify, prioritize, and execute on the highest-potential opportunities to accelerate Perplexity’s delivery cadence using frontier AI capabilities.
• Develop empathy for the nuances of technical and business teams’ work and collaborate with them to harness AI in new ways.
• Make codebases, systems, and knowledge stores legible to AI.
• Help the company find the optimal point on the quality-velocity Pareto frontier and shift that frontier outward with AI tools and agents.
• Keep abreast of new AI tools and models and make maximally effective use of them, setting an example and inspiring others.
• Make high-conviction technology bets where necessary to reduce indecision.
• Work with engineering leadership, recruiting, and others to instill an AI-forward culture and hire people who will thrive in it.
• Build both prototypes and production systems and reengineer codebases, infrastructure, processes, and other systems as needed.

Requirements

• 6+ years of industry experience, ideally with a substantial portion focused on infrastructure/platform engineering or developer acceleration at companies with millions of users and hundreds or thousands of engineers.
• Daily use of AI models/tools and strong intuition about their capabilities and limitations.
• Proficiency with Python and working fluency with TypeScript.
• Strong understanding of and empathy for the work of technical staff across disciplines; enthusiasm to learn about business and operations work.
• Broad working knowledge of typical stacks used by AI product and applied research companies (example given: familiarity with what CUDA is and when/where/why it is used, though hand-rolling CUDA kernels is not required).
• An obsession with improving legibility and reducing brittleness in software and human-orchestrated processes.
• Experience navigating exploration-exploitation tradeoffs and balancing short-term shipping needs with long-term capacity building.
• This is an extremely technical and hands-on role: you will be expected to build prototypes and production systems and to reengineer codebases and infrastructure.

Compensation & Benefits

• Cash compensation range: $250,000 - $325,000 per year.
• Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors (experience and expertise) and may vary from listed amounts.
• Equity may be part of the total compensation package.
• Benefits include comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents, and a 401(k) plan.