Engineering Manager (Agent Engine)

Perplexity • San Francisco, CA

1d • $300,000 - $485,000

About The Position

Perplexity is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead and grow its Agent Engine team, which builds agentic experiences including Perplexity Computer, the Comet ecosystem, and the Agent API. The team develops frontier intelligence systems for users and tackles open problems in AI agents, including agent harnesses for high-stakes work, action and decision models for complex multimodal states, flexible execution across local and cloud environments, secure-by-design capabilities, and effective representations and interactions between agents and their environments.

The Engineering Manager will provide technical and organizational leadership, apply AI expertise and product intuition to guide system architectures and roadmaps, and support a rapidly growing team. The role also involves improving reliability, code quality, evaluation, testing, and maintenance; hiring and mentoring engineers; and working with Perplexity’s co-founders on strategic objectives.

Requirements

• Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.
• Proficiency in Python.
• Strong technical intuition and a focus on user experience excellence.
• Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects.
• Ability to guide highly opinionated teams in making sound tradeoffs and prioritization decisions.
• Experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent.
• At least 8 years of engineering experience, including at least 3 years as an engineering manager.

Nice To Haves

• TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust proficiency.
• Domain knowledge in harness engineering.
• Domain knowledge in agent skills and plugin architectures.
• Domain knowledge in model training and reinforcement learning.
• Domain knowledge in browser technologies such as CDP, Playwright, or extension development.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across multiple layers of a rapidly growing AI agents product.
• Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI systems and related technologies to advance capabilities and scale them for a rapidly growing user base.
• Use technical and product judgment to guide system architectures and product roadmaps.
• Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the team.
• Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a growing team.
• Develop rigorous interview pipelines and work with recruiting to source candidates.
• Interface with Perplexity co-founders to deliver strategic objectives.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed