Engineering Manager (Agent Engine)

Candidate; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Agent Engine team, guiding AI system design, performance, and growth for millions of users. You will shape product roadmaps, hire and mentor engineers, and own initiatives spanning local execution, cloud environments, and secure-by-design architectures.

You will partner with co-founders to push frontier capabilities in harnesses, agent plugins, and model training, while balancing speed, reliability, and user experience.

Qualifications

• Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.
• Proficiency in Python; TypeScript/Go/Rust are a plus.
• Experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting and mentoring.
• 8+ years of engineering experience with at least 3 years in a manager role.
• Ability to guide multi-disciplinary teams and prioritize tradeoffs.
• Excellent product intuition and user experience focus.
• Strong organizational and planning skills for parallel projects.
• Experience in harness engineering, agent plugins, model training, or browser tech is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space.
• Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI systems and related technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase.
• Exercise sharp technical & product intuition to guide the team’s system architectures and product roadmaps.
• Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance for the broader team.
• Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a rapidly growing team. Develop rigorous interview pipelines and work closely with recruiting to source candidates.
• Interface with the Perplexity co-founders to deliver strategic objectives that redefine what’s possible in the AI industry.

Skills

AI systems stack

Python

TypeScript

Go

Rust

Harness engineering

Agent plugins

Model training

Reinforcement learning

Browser tech

UX mindset

Leadership & mentoring

Hiring & onboarding

Engineering management

Extensive engineering experience

Job description

Perplexity is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead and grow our highly driven Agent Engine team. The Agent Engine team designs and builds powerful agentic experiences including Perplexity Computer, the Comet ecosystem, our Agent API, and more. In short, we build frontier intelligence systems for the world's most discerning users.

As the engineering manager supporting the Agent Engine team, you'll bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and strong leadership and collaboration skills to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users. You'll lead, grow, and support a team in solving many open problems in AI, including:

• Designing frontier agent harnesses and systems to perform high-stakes, mission-critical work for our users;

• Leveraging action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives;

• Providing consistently excellent experiences across local execution, headless cloud, custom executors, and other environments through sound system design and flexible abstractions;

• 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

• Provide technical leadership across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space.

• Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI systems and related technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase.

• Exercise sharp technical & product intuition to guide the team’s system architectures and product roadmaps.

• Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance for the broader team.

• Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a rapidly growing team. Develop rigorous interview pipelines and work closely with recruiting to source candidates.

• Interface with the Perplexity co-founders to deliver strategic objectives that redefine what’s possible in the AI industry.

Qualifications

• Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.

• Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).

• Domain knowledge in at least one of the following areas:

  • Harness engineering

  • Agent Skills and plugin architectures

  • Model training and reinforcement learning

  • Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)

• Strong technical intuition and taste for 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 is critical.

• Experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent.

• 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 of those years as an engineering manager.