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

Wwshemi; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity, a leader in frontier AI experiences, is seeking energetic engineers to join our Agent Engine team in San Francisco. You will help design and build agentic systems including Perplexity Computer, the Comet ecosystem, and our Agent API, advancing how users interact with intelligent agents.

You’ll collaborate with engineering and applied research to tackle open problems, with a bias toward ownership, shipping reliable products, and delivering delightful user experiences across local and

Qualifications

• Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.
• Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
• Experience in at least one of: harness engineering, agent skills and plugin architectures, model training and reinforcement learning, or browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development).
• Strong technical intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
• Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team; bias toward ownership.

Responsibilities

• Design frontier agent harnesses and systems to perform high-stakes, mission-critical work for users.
• Leverage action and decision models to accomplish user-specified objectives based on multimodal states.
• Provide consistently excellent experiences across local execution, headless cloud, custom executors, and other environments through sound system design and flexible abstractions.
• Develop permission architectures, payload classifiers, and other methods to implement secure-by-design agentic capabilities.
• Design optimal data representations and modes of interaction between agents and their environments.
• Collaborate with engineering and applied research to solve open AI problems.

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 (https://www.perplexity.ai/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.