Engineering Manager (API Platform)

Apply; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Apply is seeking a strong technical leader to steer the API Platform engineering team in San Francisco. This role involves designing and implementing critical APIs that serve thousands of customers. Ideal for seasoned engineering managers passionate about providing programmatic access to frontier intelligence.

You and your team will work on optimizing performance, and architecting solutions that meet the growing demands of customers. Join us to lead a rapidly growing team and innovate in AI infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 years as an engineering manager.
• Strong customer empathy ensuring ergonomic API designs.
• Experience in managing high-traffic API design and performance tuning.

Responsibilities

• Lead the API Platform engineering team to meet growth demands.
• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs.
• Oversee hiring and mentorship for a growing team.

Skills

Python

Go

Rust

API design

Customer empathy

Organizational skills

Job description

Perplexity API Platform

Perplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration to serve the world's most discerning users. The Perplexity API Platform brings our technology to the world's most discerning developers.

From exabyte-scale knowledge indexes to codegen-first agent runtimes, the building blocks behind Perplexity's applications are some of the most battle-tested AI systems in the industry. We believe these same building blocks can and should power the aspirations of builders everywhere. It's one thing to solve planet-scale retrieval, long-horizon orchestration, and other foundational AI challenges within a single product ecosystem. The true measure of success is to turn those solutions into elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike.

Our API Platform delivers frontier intelligence to thousands of customers: startups, trillion-dollar enterprises, U.S. and allied governments, and everyone in between. We've achieved incredible scale, yet we're just getting started. Join us to build tools for curious minds.

About this role

Perplexity is seeking a strong technical leader to steer the API Platform engineering team through a rapid period of growth. Our company builds technology that reshapes how people search, reason, and interact with the world around them. Week after week, we observe increasing demand for programmatic interfaces to that technology. The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling these interfaces.

You and your team will work on an eclectic portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and frontier topics that often change with each passing month. Throughout this work, you'll prioritize great developer and agent experience alike. You'll also define technical strategy for how we scale to meet compounding growth exponentials (number of customers, agents per customer, compute/retrieval per agent, etc.).

This role is ideal for seasoned engineering managers who are unusually passionate about providing the world with programmatic access to the building blocks of frontier intelligence.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide both technical and team leadership across multiple layers of our rapidly growing API business.

• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.

• Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today.

• 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.

• Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs.

• Track and ensure progress toward top-line business goals, in close coordination with engineering and business executives.

Qualifications

• Entrepreneurial attitude; able and eager to run more than just engineering.

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

• Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.

• Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards) is a strong plus.

• Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike.

• 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.