Engineering Manager, Multimodal Real-Time AI

Engg; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Multimodal team in San Francisco to lead realtime voice and multimodal experiences. You will hire and mentor engineers, set technical direction, and drive new AI-powered products at the intersection of voice, vision, and agents.

This role focuses on turning live conversations into capabilities used across Perplexity's apps, balancing latency, reliability, and scalability.

Qualifications

• Experience managing engineering teams.
• Strong software engineering background in backend or distributed systems.
• Experience designing and operating production services in rapidly scaling environments on AWS or similar cloud infrastructure.
• Track record of leading teams to ship complex projects in a fast-moving environment.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into clear technical priorities.
• Clear communication across teams.
• Experience with Rust, Python, Go, or similar languages. We work primarily in Rust and Python.
• Genuine interest and adoption of AI products and willingness to learn quickly.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team building realtime voice and multimodal experiences across Perplexity, taking new products from first prototype to production launch.
• Own the team's roadmap, deciding which voice and vision experiences to build next and what infrastructure they need to succeed.
• Hire and develop engineers, giving them ownership of meaningful technical problems and the feedback to grow.
• Shape the architecture behind the full voice experience, from a user speaking into a device to models, tools, and agents responding.
• Lead the systems that turn live conversations into action, connecting voice models to tools, agents, and long-running tasks.
• Guide the team through the latency, reliability, and scaling challenges of live voice, including session recovery and performance under load.
• Partner with SDK, client, infrastructure, and model teams to turn new audio and vision capabilities into experiences people can use across our apps.
• Use user feedback and production performance to improve the experience after launch and decide where the team should invest next.

Skills

Team management

Backend systems

Cloud infrastructure

Project delivery

Product judgment

Communication

Rust

Python

Go

AI interest

Job description

Perplexity is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Multimodal team in San Francisco to lead realtime voice and multimodal experiences. You will hire and mentor engineers, set technical direction, and drive new AI-powered products at the intersection of voice, vision, and agents.

This role focuses on turning live conversations into capabilities used across Perplexity's apps, balancing latency, reliability, and scalability.