Member of Technical Staff (TPM, Compute)

Perplexity • San Francisco, CA

1d • $170,000 - $265,000

About The Position

Perplexity is seeking a technical program manager to own planning, onboarding, and operations for the GPU compute supporting its products. The role spans compute capacity used for Ask, Computer, and API traffic across multiple cloud and neocloud providers. Demand changes with customer growth, product launches, and model releases, so the position works across engineering, research, Finance, and providers to forecast needs, bring capacity into production, and improve fleet reliability, utilization, and cost.

The role combines technical and commercial responsibilities and involves building a compute operations function with little precedent. It includes capacity planning, provider management, operational metrics, request workflows, and processes and tooling for requesting, planning, allocating, and tracking compute.

Requirements

• 6+ years of technical program management, capacity planning, or infrastructure operations in cloud environments, leading programs across teams and vendors.
• Direct experience with GPU or accelerator fleets across training and inference workloads.
• Experience working directly with cloud or neocloud providers on reserved capacity, capacity commitments, onboarding, or vendor performance management.
• Experience with infrastructure cost modeling, unit economics, or cost attribution in partnership with Finance.
• Technical depth in cluster management, scheduling, and orchestration, plus data skills to build forecasts and dashboards independently.
• Ability to surface difficult trade-offs and communicate them clearly to audiences from engineers to executives.
• Ability to thrive in a small, agile team and take initiative and ownership in an environment with little precedent.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Finance to forecast compute demand 3–12 months ahead based on customer growth, model releases, and post-training and evaluation plans.
• Work with Finance and engineering leadership to make capacity commitment and budget decisions, and verify that proposed capacity fits the plan before committing.
• Bring new capacity online and lead transitions from contract through production, including provider onboarding, acceptance criteria, migration, and decommissioning.
• Build a trusted view of fleet capacity, cost, allocation, uptime, reliability, and utilization by provider and workload.
• Drive utilization, reliability, and cost-efficiency, reclaim idle capacity, and surface trade-offs.
• Own inference and compute requests end to end, triaging and resolving GPU, deployment, and quota requests, and building self-service paths for routine requests.
• Manage compute provider relationships through scorecards and regular reviews of reliability, support, and delivery, using the data to guide provider engagement.
• Partner with engineering, research, and Finance on capacity decisions for training, batch inference, and real-time production inference.
• Build the processes and tooling to request, plan, allocate, and track compute, with clear owners.

What This Job Offers

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