About this role
The Perplexity API Platform team builds robust infrastructure, search systems, and agent orchestration tools that bring advanced AI capabilities to external developers, startups, and enterprise customers. Daily work centers on designing, implementing, and scaling high-traffic programmatic interfaces, spanning distributed systems, performance tuning, and emerging frontier technologies.
Strong technical leaders are needed to guide this expanding engineering group through rapid compounding growth while maintaining high standards for reliability and developer experience. Ideal candidates bring a combination of technical depth in distributed infrastructure and a track record of hiring, mentoring, and retaining high-caliber engineering talent.
What you will do
- Provide technical and team leadership across multiple layers of a rapidly growing API business.
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that supply customers with the foundational blocks for frontier intelligence.
- Anticipate future customer architectures while reliably supporting current production workloads.
- Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the engineering group.
- Manage hiring, onboarding, and mentorship, including developing rigorous interview pipelines in partnership with recruiting.
- Collaborate across departments to integrate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and refine existing features.
What you need
- Bring at least 8 years of total engineering experience, including a minimum of 3 years spent as an engineering manager.
- Demonstrate proficiency in Python.
- Possess a strong grasp of high-traffic API design, covering schema evolution, versioning, idempotency, authentication, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
- Show strong organizational skills capable of managing parallel technical projects and guiding teams through trade-off decisions.
- Exhibit customer empathy and product sense to ensure built APIs remain ergonomic and well-documented for developers and agents.
Nice to have
- Proficiency in Go
- Proficiency in Rust
- Experience with modern AI APIs involving latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, and emerging standards
Benefits
- Offers Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the location for this position?
The job is located in San Francisco.
What compensation is associated with the role?
The salary ranges from $300K to $405K and includes equity offerings.
What programming languages are required?
Proficiency in Python is required, with bonus points awarded for Go and Rust.