Applied AI Engineer: Frontier Models & Agent Systems

Perplexity AI; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity AI is seeking a senior software engineer to join the Agent Capabilities team, turning frontier AI breakthroughs into reusable product capabilities. You will own the lifecycle from prototyping to production, shaping agent behavior, safety, and observability while delivering measurable user impact.

The role emphasizes strong software fundamentals, experience with AI/ML products, and a track record of owning complex, high-ownership systems.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience owning the AI product lifecycle, including data analysis, rigorous evaluation, production monitoring, and iterative improvement.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with experience building and operating AI/ML products, backend services, or distributed systems at scale.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate frontier models against real user tasks, identify useful behaviors and failure modes, and turn the most promising advances into production agent systems. Own the lifecycle from rapid prototyping and evaluation through launch, monitoring, and iteration.
• Improve agents’ ability to plan, use tools, manage context, recover from errors, and complete long-running tasks reliably.
• Apply state of the art ML and LLM techniques to design scalable agent capabilities such as skills, plugins, artifact generation, tools integrate and use, auto-research, and multi-agent collaboration.
• Own agent behavior and capabilities end-to-end, from user-facing products and interfaces to backend services. Define offline and online evaluations for task completion, correctness, safety, latency, cost, and user satisfaction.
• Iteratively improve across models, prompts, harnesses, and products for different problem spaces.
• Build secure, observable, and reliable agent systems, including permissions and safeguards for sensitive actions.
• Collaborate closely with PM, Data Science, Research, to identify high-impact opportunities in understanding and validating emerging model capabilities, and turn complex agent behaviors into simple, reliable product experiences.
• Apply relevant advances in models, inference, evaluation, and agent architecture when they produce measurable improvements in production performance.

Job description

Perplexity AI is seeking a senior software engineer to join the Agent Capabilities team, turning frontier AI breakthroughs into reusable product capabilities. You will own the lifecycle from prototyping to production, shaping agent behavior, safety, and observability while delivering measurable user impact.

The role emphasizes strong software fundamentals, experience with AI/ML products, and a track record of owning complex, high-ownership systems.