About this role
Engineers who thrive on guiding ambitious teams through open-ended technical challenges will find a natural fit leading the Agents engineering group at Perplexity. This team brings together backend, full-stack, and AI/ML specialists to build agentic experiences within the Comet ecosystem, aiming to give users AI agents that faithfully execute complex intentions. Operating from San Francisco, the group tackles frontier problems in AI ranging from browser navigation to secure-by-design architectures.
As the Tech Lead Manager, you will combine AI expertise with product intuition to shape system architectures and roadmaps for millions of users. Daily work involves designing agents that perform valuable units of work, training action and decision models on multimodal states, and partnering with company co-founders on strategic objectives. Success requires balancing hands-on technical guidance with people management, including hiring, mentorship, and driving code quality across the broader team.
What you will do
- Provide technical leadership across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space.
- Develop and leverage advanced AI models, infrastructure, and browser technologies to scale capabilities for a growing user base.
- Exercise technical and product intuition to guide system architectures and product roadmaps.
- Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the team.
- Oversee hiring, onboarding, mentorship, and pipeline development for a growing engineering group.
- Interface directly with Perplexity co-founders to deliver strategic objectives that redefine industry standards.
What you need
- Possess strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack.
- Demonstrate proficiency in Python, with bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and Rust.
- Bring domain expertise in context engineering, post-training, reinforcement learning, or browser technologies.
- Show a strong background and hands-on technical experience with frontier models.
- Manage parallel technical projects and guide highly-opinionated teams through trade-offs and prioritization.
- Have prior experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting, growing, and retaining talent.
- Bring at least 8 years of total engineering experience with a minimum of 3 years in an engineering management role.
Nice to have
- Proficiency in TypeScript
- Proficiency in Go
- Proficiency in Rust
Benefits
- Offers Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
Where is this role located?
This position is based in San Francisco.
What is the compensation package?
The salary ranges from $300K to $405K and includes offers for equity.
What will I be working on?
You will lead the Agents engineering team to build agentic experiences within the Comet ecosystem, designing AI agents that navigate the digital world and train decision models.
What level of experience is required?
The role requires 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 of those years spent in an engineering management capacity.