Applied AI Engineer: Frontier Models & Agent Capabilities

Perplexity; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

the company Computer is seeking a senior software engineer to build and own frontier AI-powered agent capabilities. You will evaluate new model behaviours, design scalable agent features, and drive production readiness from prototyping to monitoring.

You will collaborate with PM, Data Science, Research to identify high-impact opportunities and ship durable, user-facing AI solutions at scale in a fast-growing startup environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience owning the AI product lifecycle with data analysis and monitoring.
• Practical work with agent harnesses, tool use, or long-running tasks.
• Strong product judgment to translate needs into durable AI solutions.
• Genuine interest in frontier AI capabilities and experimentation.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate frontier models against real user tasks and turn promising advances into production agent systems.
• Improve agents' planning, tool use, context management, error recovery, and reliability.
• Apply state-of-the-art ML/LLM techniques to design scalable agent capabilities (skills, plugins, artifacts).
• Own agent behavior end-to-end, from user interfaces to backend services with evaluation plans.
• Build secure, observable agent systems with tracing, monitoring, and safeguards.
• Collaborate with PM, Data Science, Research to identify high-impact opportunities.

Skills

Strong software engineering

AI product lifecycle

Agent harnesses & tool use

Product judgment & execution

Frontier AI curiosity

Tools

Python

Go

Rust

PostgreSQL

DynamoDB

AWS

TypeScript

Job description

the company Computer is seeking a senior software engineer to build and own frontier AI-powered agent capabilities. You will evaluate new model behaviours, design scalable agent features, and drive production readiness from prototyping to monitoring.

You will collaborate with PM, Data Science, Research to identify high-impact opportunities and ship durable, user-facing AI solutions at scale in a fast-growing startup environment.