Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agents)

Perplexity; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits including equity, health, and dental

Retirement and fitness accounts

Job summary

A leading AI technology firm is seeking a talented engineer to join their Comet Agents team in San Francisco. The role involves developing advanced AI capabilities, collaborating with various teams, and ensuring high-quality user experiences. Candidates should have strong AI product stack familiarity and proficiency in Python, while experience in context engineering, reinforcement learning, and browser technologies is advantageous. The team fosters innovation and ownership in a fast-paced environment, offering a competitive compensation range of $200K to $300K.

Qualifications

• Experience in multimodal models, particularly for post-training and reinforcement learning.
• Proficiency in other languages such as TypeScript or Go is a plus.
• Ability to design complex AI agent capabilities innovatively.

Responsibilities

• Drive AI capabilities across multiple layers of the product.
• Develop AI models and technologies for a growing user base.
• Ensure high quality in AI agent performance and user experience.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate functionality.
• Contribute to product reliability and code quality.

Skills

Familiarity with the full AI product stack

Proficiency in Python

Experience in context engineering and tool interfaces

Experience in post-training and reinforcement learning

Familiarity with browser technologies

Strong product intuition

Comfortable with fast-moving teams

Passion for shipping products

Job description

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

AI

Compensation

• $200K – $300K • Offers Equity

U.S. Benefits

Full‑time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.

International Benefits

Full‑time employees outside the U.S. enjoy a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region of residence.

Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Perplexity is seeking an energetic engineer to join our highly driven Comet Agents engineering team. The Comet Agents team consists of AI/ML, backend, and full‑stack engineers who collaborate to build delightful agentic experiences within our Comet ecosystem. Our vision is to empower our users with AI agents that can faithfully actualize their intent, however and wherever expressed, through open‑ended interactions with the world.

As an engineer on our Comet Agents team, you will 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 will work across applied research and engineering to solve many open problems in AI, including:

• Designing AI agents to navigate the digital world and perform increasingly valuable units of work for our users;
• Training action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user‑specified objectives;
• Providing consistently excellent experiences across desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other environments through flexible abstractions and frictionless backgrounding;
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Drive cutting‑edge AI capabilities across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space.
• Develop and leverage cutting‑edge AI models, infrastructure, and browser technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase.
• Ensure a high craft and quality bar, in both AI agent performance and user experience.
• Collaborate with fellow engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists, and others across the company to integrate core Perplexity functionality into Comet agents and vice‑versa.
• Contribute to product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the broader team.

Qualifications

• Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack.
• Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
• Significant experience in at least one of the following areas:
  • Context engineering and tool interfaces for frontier AI models
  • Post‑training and reinforcement learning (particularly for multimodal models)
  • Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
• Strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
• Comfortable working with a small, fast‑moving team, must be willing to dive in and take ownership.
• A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.

Compensation Range: $200K – $300K