Engineering Manager — Frontier AI Agents

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 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.