Tech Lead - Acceleration

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 powers answers to hundreds of millions of queries monthly. The company’s objective is to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making and assistive AI wherever decisions are being made.

Role overview

Perplexity is seeking a creative and energetic engineer to found and lead the Acceleration team as its Tech Lead. The team will focus on using AI tools and agents to multiply the leverage of Perplexity’s teams, improving delivery cadence and developer/product velocity. This is an extremely technical, hands-on role that combines AI product development, infrastructure/platform engineering, developer experience, and process engineering. You will build prototypes and production systems and reengineer codebases, infrastructure, and company processes to realize this vision.

Responsibilities

• Identify, prioritize, and execute on high-potential opportunities to accelerate Perplexity’s delivery cadence with frontier AI capabilities.
• Develop empathy for the nuances of technical and business teams to collaborate on harnessing AI.
• Make codebases, systems, and knowledge stores legible to AI.
• Shift the quality-velocity Pareto frontier outward using AI tools and agents.
• Keep abreast of new AI tools/models and make effective use of them personally and across the company.
• Make high-conviction technology bets where appropriate.
• Work with engineering leadership and recruiting to instill an AI-forward culture and hire people who will thrive in it.
• Build prototypes and production systems; reengineer codebases, infrastructure, and processes as required.

Requirements (Qualifications)

• 6+ years of industry experience, 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.
• Working fluency with TypeScript.
• Strong understanding of and empathy for the work of technical staff across disciplines, plus enthusiasm to learn business and operations work.
• Broad working knowledge of typical stacks used by AI product & applied research companies (e.g., awareness of CUDA and when/where/why it’s used).
• Obsession with improving legibility and reducing brittleness in both software and human-orchestrated processes.
• Experience balancing exploration-exploitation tradeoffs, shipping today while building capacity for tomorrow.

Benefits and compensation

• Cash compensation range: $250,000 - $325,000 per year.
• Equity may be part of the total compensation package.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents.
• 401(k) plan.

Additional context

• The role expects voracious use of advanced AI tools/models and a capacious imagination to rethink how work gets done.
• The Acceleration team will lead both software and process engineering to harness AI across frontend, backend, applied research, and business operations.