Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Desktop Apps)

Perplexity; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 400,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity AI in San Francisco, CA, is seeking experienced Generalist Software Engineers to join our Perplexity and Comet application teams. You will work across desktop and mobile stacks, shipping high-quality native applications and contributing to performance-focused architecture.

The role requires collaborating with product, design, data science, and infrastructure teams to deliver end-to-end experiences, from UI to deployment and monitoring.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of industry experience shipping native apps.
• Architectural design experience understandable by both agents and humans.
• Strong focus on performance and scalable code.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with product teams to build mobile UX.
• Design fast, intuitive UI with designers.
• Instrument and analyze end-to-end user experiences with ML teams.
• Coordinate with infra and QA on deployment, testing and monitoring.

Skills

4+ years experience

Native applications shipping

Architecture design

Performance optimization

Cross-codebase proficiency

Job description

Perplexity AI is looking for experienced Generalist Software Engineers to join our Perplexity and Comet application teams. Our team is reshaping knowledge work through our high-impact desktop and Comet apps. The ideal candidate should have strong programming skills and multiple years of experience shipping high-quality, production software. Our stack spans several different skillsets, including Rust, Kotlin, Swift, Typescript, Chromium and Perplexity’s core AI stack. We have found that our strongest engineers are capable of working across multiple codebases and ramping up quickly, and we expect the same high bar for candidates.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with product teams to implement novel mobile experiences.
• Work closely with design teams to design fast and intuitive UI.
• Utilize Perplexity Computer and other Agentic coding tools to accelerate development.
• Collaborate with data science and machine learning teams to instrument, analyze, and improve the end-to-end experience.
• Work with infrastructure and QA teams on deployment processes, including testing, release, and monitoring.

Requirements

• 4+ years industry experience
• Experience in shipping high-quality native applications
• Architecture experience in writing code understandable by both agents and humans
• Deep understanding of app performance
• Ability to own projects and surfaces, and to push them forward proactively

Compensation Range: $200K - $400K