Member of Technical Staff, AI Products (Early Career - Industry)
About this role
Building user-facing surfaces end to end takes center stage here, spanning from interface design and frontend implementation through application logic, APIs, data models, and the search or model calls behind them. Engineers ship code to production continuously, with new team members typically getting work in front of users during their first week.
Perplexity operates on roughly 200 million queries a day backed by a 200 billion plus URL index, powering flagship products like Search, Comet, and Computer. The product engineering group functions without strict frontend or backend silos, expecting team members to tackle ambiguous product ideas, build working prototypes, and use real usage data and evals to drive decisions.
Ideal candidates thrive in environments with minimal process, leveraging coding models and agents aggressively to move fast while maintaining sound judgment. The position suits early-career software engineers who prefer direct collaboration with designers, product managers, and research engineers over waiting for formal specification documents.
What you will do
- Own a user-facing surface end to end, managing everything from interaction design and frontend code to application logic, APIs, data models, and underlying model calls.
- Ship code to production continuously, ensuring new implementations reach users quickly.
- Build with AI as a primary tool by using agents and coding models aggressively to accelerate development.
- Transform ambiguous product ideas into working prototypes and evaluate them using real usage data and evals.
- Improve reliability, latency, and overall engineering craft for the owned surfaces.
- Collaborate directly with designers, product managers, and research engineers without intermediate process.
What you need
- Have at least one year of professional software engineering experience or a strong internship track record shipping production code at scale.
- Demonstrate strength in at least one backend language such as Python or Go, including experience across services, APIs, and relational data modeling.
- Feel comfortable working in React and TypeScript on the frontend.
- Provide real evidence of building through production work, shipped side projects with users, meaningful open-source contributions, hackathon wins, or research turned into software.
- Show comfort with ambiguity and the ability to start building incrementally without waiting for a specification.
- Possess hands-on experience with AI products along with informed opinions about their current limitations.
Nice to have
- Experience with the core stack including React, Next.js, Python, Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, and AWS.
- Experience building on top of LLMs such as AI orchestration, RAG, evals, agents, and tool use.
- Strong product taste with the ability to evaluate interfaces and propose specific improvements.
- A public track record such as a GitHub profile, technical blog, or working demo.
Benefits
- Offers Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
Who is eligible to apply for this role?
This role is intended for industry candidates already working in software engineering for the past one or more years. New graduates and current students should not apply to this opening.
What is the compensation structure for this position?
The salary ranges from $180K to $270K and includes equity offerings.
What kind of tech stack will I be using?
The work involves React, TypeScript, Python, and Go, alongside exposure to tools and technologies like PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, and AWS.