Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agent Engine)

Perplexity; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity in San Francisco is seeking energetic engineers for the Agent Engine team to build frontier intelligence systems for millions of users. You will design and implement agent harnesses, integrate with our Perplexity Computer and Agent API, and collaborate with research.

You should be proficient in Python; experience with TypeScript/Go/Rust is a plus. You’ll own features end to end, ship reliable products, and help define secure, scalable architectures.

Qualifications

• Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.
• Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go and Rust).
• Experience in at least one of: Harness engineering; Agent skills and plugin architectures; Model training and RL; Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extensions).
• Strong technical intuition and taste for UX excellence.
• Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team; ownership bias.

Responsibilities

• Design frontier agent harnesses and systems for high-stakes work.
• Develop models and architectures to enable agents to achieve user objectives.
• Ensure consistent experiences across local and cloud environments with robust design.
• Collaborate with engineering and research to ship reliable features.

Skills

AI systems familiarity

Problem solving

Team collaboration

Tools

Python

TypeScript

Go

Rust

Job description

Perplexity is seeking energetic engineers to join our highly driven Agent Engine team. The Agent Engine team designs and builds powerful agentic experiences including Perplexity Computer, the Comet ecosystem, our Agent API, and more. In short, we build frontier intelligence systems for the world's most discerning users.

As an engineer on our Agent Engine team, you'll bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and a tinkerer's mindset to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users. You'll work across engineering and applied research to solve many open problems in AI, including:

• Designing frontier agent harnesses and systems to perform high-stakes, mission-critical work for our users;
• Leveraging action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives;
• Providing consistently excellent experiences across local execution, headless cloud, custom executors, and other environments through sound system design and flexible abstractions;
• Developing permission architectures, payload classifiers, and other methods to implement secure-by-design agentic capabilities;
• Designing optimal data representations and modes of interaction between agents and their environments;
• and much, much more.

Qualifications

• Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.
• Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
• Significant experience in at least one of the following areas:
  • Harness engineering
  • Agent Skills and plugin architectures
  • Model training and reinforcement learning
  • Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
• Strong technical intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
• Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team; bias toward ownership.
• A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.