Engineering Manager (API Platform)

Perplexity; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity in San Francisco is seeking a strong technical leader to head the API Platform engineering team during a rapid growth phase. This role encompasses leadership across multiple layers of our API business while ensuring code quality, reliability, and performance.
We're looking for an individual with a deep understanding of API design, an entrepreneurial spirit, and strong management skills, ideally with 8+ years of engineering experience including team management.

An attractive compensation range of $300K to $405K reflects the importance of this role within the company's growth strategy.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 of those years as an engineering manager.
• Strong understanding of high-traffic API design including schema evolution and performance tuning.
• Experience managing engineering teams including recruiting and retaining talent.

Responsibilities

• Provide both technical and team leadership across multiple layers of the API business.
• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs.
• Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a growing team.

Skills

Proficiency in Python

Go and/or Rust

API design skills

Organizational skills for project management

Customer empathy and product sense

Job description

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.

Compensation Range: $300K - $405K