Member of Technical Staff (Applied AI Engineer, Agent Capabilities)

Perplexity AI; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity AI is seeking a senior software engineer to join the Agent Capabilities team, turning frontier AI breakthroughs into reusable product capabilities. You will own the lifecycle from prototyping to production, shaping agent behavior, safety, and observability while delivering measurable user impact.

The role emphasizes strong software fundamentals, experience with AI/ML products, and a track record of owning complex, high-ownership systems.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience owning the AI product lifecycle, including data analysis, rigorous evaluation, production monitoring, and iterative improvement.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with experience building and operating AI/ML products, backend services, or distributed systems at scale.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate frontier models against real user tasks, identify useful behaviors and failure modes, and turn the most promising advances into production agent systems. Own the lifecycle from rapid prototyping and evaluation through launch, monitoring, and iteration.
• Improve agents’ ability to plan, use tools, manage context, recover from errors, and complete long-running tasks reliably.
• Apply state of the art ML and LLM techniques to design scalable agent capabilities such as skills, plugins, artifact generation, tools integrate and use, auto-research, and multi-agent collaboration.
• Own agent behavior and capabilities end-to-end, from user-facing products and interfaces to backend services. Define offline and online evaluations for task completion, correctness, safety, latency, cost, and user satisfaction.
• Iteratively improve across models, prompts, harnesses, and products for different problem spaces.
• Build secure, observable, and reliable agent systems, including permissions and safeguards for sensitive actions.
• Collaborate closely with PM, Data Science, Research, to identify high-impact opportunities in understanding and validating emerging model capabilities, and turn complex agent behaviors into simple, reliable product experiences.
• Apply relevant advances in models, inference, evaluation, and agent architecture when they produce measurable improvements in production performance.

Job description

• As every major breakthrough in AI models creates new possibilities, the Agent Capabilities team is responsible for turning frontier AI breakthroughs into reusable product capabilities. We are often the first to evaluate emerging model capabilities, determine where they create real user value, and transform them into reliable, scalable, high quality experiences for both users and agents. This is a highly leveraged role with broad ownership at the intersection of frontier AI research, agent systems, platform engineering, and product innovation
• Evaluate frontier models against real user tasks, identify useful behaviors and failure modes, and turn the most promising advances into production agent systems. Own the lifecycle from rapid prototyping and evaluation through launch, monitoring, and iteration
• Improve agents’ ability to plan, use tools, manage context, recover from errors, and complete long-running tasks reliably
• Apply state of the art ML and LLM techniques to design scalable agent capabilities such as skills, plugins, artifact generation, tools integrate and use, auto-research, and multi-agent collaboration. Shape the architecture, abstractions, and product experiences that enable both users and agents to compose increasingly sophisticated solutions for real-world tasks
• Own agent behavior and capabilities end-to-end, from user-facing products and interfaces to backend services. Define offline and online evaluations for task completion, correctness, safety, latency, cost, and user satisfaction. Iteratively improve across models, prompts, harnesses, and products for different problem spaces
• Build secure, observable, and reliable agent systems, including permissions and safeguards for sensitive actions. Develop tracing, replay, and monitoring infrastructure that makes agent failures reproducible and actionable
• Collaborate closely with PM, Data Science, Research, to identify high-impact opportunities in understanding and validating emerging model capabilities, and turn complex agent behaviors into simple, reliable product experiences
• Apply relevant advances in models, inference, evaluation, and agent architecture when they produce measurable improvements in production performance. Set technical direction on ambiguous problems and raise the bar through design reviews, mentorship, and technical leadership

Strong product judgment and execution: you can translate ambiguous user needs into applied AI or ML problems and ship durable solutions with measurable user impactExperience owning the AI product lifecycle, including data analysis, rigorous evaluation, production monitoring, and iterative improvement. Able to define metrics and use production data and user feedback to guide decisionsGenuine interest in frontier AI capabilities, agent systems, and excitement for rapidly exploring, evaluating, and productizing new model behaviorsTypically 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of building and owning robust AI-powered, large-scale, user-facing or data-intensive products. Exceptional candidates with less experience and an outstanding record of impact are encouraged to applyStrong software engineering fundamentals, with experience building and operating AI/ML products, backend services, or distributed systems at scalePractical experience in one or more relevant areas, such as agent harnesses, tool use, context engineering, model evaluation, browser automation, or long-running task executionAI/ML research experience demonstrated through publications, open-source contributions, or other meaningful research impactTime spent at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering teamExperience with mid-training, post-training, or reinforcement learning for frontier or open-source models, along with a strong understanding of model strengths and limitations across reasoning, tool use, context management, and long-horizon tasksExperience building agent permissions, safeguards, evaluation infrastructure, or production observability systemsDeep familiarity with the strengths and limitations of current model families across reasoning, tool use, context management, and long-horizon tasksExperience with LLM context engineering or harness engineering, experience with subagents, coding assistants, long-running or autonomous task execution