Feeny
Perplexity

Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agents) at Perplexity (San Francisco, CA)

Perplexity· San Francisco, CA· $220k–$405k·

Role details

Salary
$220k–$405k
Employment
Full-Time
Equity
Yes

Perplexity at a glance

AI-powered answer engine that returns real-time, cited answers, now expanding into an agentic browser and on-device agents.

Perplexity runs an AI answer engine that searches the live web and returns direct, cited answers instead of a page of links. It has extended that core into an AI browser (Comet), an on-device agent (Computer), a developer API, and vertical tools like patent search.

$1.7B raised · latest: Series E extension · $200M · 2025 (reported $20B valuation) · backed by Accel, IVP, NEA, SoftBank Vision Fund 2

Job description

Perplexity is seeking energetic engineers to join our highly driven Agents engineering team. The Agents team consists of backend, full-stack, and AI/ML engineers who collaborate to build harnesses and AI systems powering delightful agentic experiences. These experiences include Perplexity Computer (our platform for generalized frontier intelligence), the Comet ecosystem, our Agent API, and more. Our vision is to empower our users with agents that can faithfully actualize their intent, however and wherever expressed, through open-ended interactions with the world. As an engineer on our Agents team, you will bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and a tinkerer's mindset to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users. You will work across applied research and engineering to solve many open problems in AI, including:

  • Designing AI agents to navigate the digital world and perform increasingly valuable units of work for our users;
  • Training action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives;
  • Providing consistently excellent experiences across desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other environments through flexible abstractions and frictionless backgrounding;
  • Developing permission architectures, payload classifiers, and other methods to implement secure-by-design agentic capabilities;
  • Designing optimal data representations and modes of interaction between agents and their environments;
  • and much, much more.

Responsibilities

  • Engineer agent harnesses that connect powerful models with the environments and tools required to perform economically valuable work for users.
  • Drive cutting-edge AI capabilities across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space.
  • Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI models, infrastructure, and browser technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase.
  • Ensure a high craft and quality bar, in both AI agent performance and user experience.
  • Collaborate with fellow engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists, and others across the company to integrate core Perplexity functionality into our frontier agentic products and vice-versa.
  • Contribute to product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the broader team.

Qualifications

  • Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack.
  • Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
  • Significant experience in at least one of the following areas:
  • Context engineering and tool interfaces for frontier AI models
  • Post-training and reinforcement learning (particularly for multimodal models)
  • Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
  • Strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
  • Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team, must be willing to dive in and take ownership.
  • A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.

Why work at Perplexity

  • Culture & Environment: “Thoughtful support” culture with emphasis on craftsmanship, ownership, entrepreneurship, scholarship, and partnership. Hybrid schedule (4 days in-office) based on location.
  • Perks: Daily catered meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner in office), office snacks, ride home program, commuter benefits, home office reimbursement, fitness classes, gym memberships.
  • Compensation & Benefits: Competitive salary and equity packages; retirement plans with company match; flexible PTO; holiday shutdown between Christmas and New Year; 12 weeks paid bonding leave; comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
  • Relocation & Visa Support: Relocation assistance and visa/green card sponsorship for eligible roles. Partners with immigration firm to support the process.
  • Engineering Excellence: “Technical assessment for relevant roles”; values hands-on contribution, broad skill sets, and merit-based evaluation. Frequent Tech Talks and exposure to greenfield AI research problems.

Application questions