Engineering Manager - API Platform & Frontier AI

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

Job summary

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.

You'll design and scale APIs, prioritise developer and agent experience, and define the strategy to meet exponential growth. This role targets an experienced manager who cares about frontier AI capabilities and delivering reliable, ergonomic APIs for thousands of

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, rate limiting, performance tuning.
• Experience with modern AI APIs (latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration) is a strong plus.
• Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensures ergonomic, well-documented APIs.
• Strong organizational skills for managing parallel projects and guiding teams in tradeoffs.
• Experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting and retention.
• 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 as an engineering manager.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical and team leadership across multiple layers of our API business.
• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs for frontier intelligence.
• Reimagine customer needs while serving today’s workloads.
• Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance.
• Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship; build rigorous interview pipelines with recruiting.
• Collaborate across teams to integrate frontier capabilities into the API Platform.
• Track progress toward top-line goals with engineering and executives.

Skills

Python

Go

Rust

API design

Team leadership

Hiring

Mentorship

Customer empathy

Job description

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.

You'll design and scale APIs, prioritise developer and agent experience, and define the strategy to meet exponential growth. This role targets an experienced manager who cares about frontier AI capabilities and delivering reliable, ergonomic APIs for thousands of