Member of Technical Staff (TPM, Inference)

Perplexity AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity AI is seeking a technical program manager to align model providers, engineering, and product teams to advance the core inference platform in SF.

You will own delivery across latency, throughput, uptime, and cost, orchestrate external partners, and drive the onboarding and rollout of new models while shaping the operating model for this growing function.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of combined technical program management or product management experience.
• Experience in infrastructure, distributed systems, or ML/model-serving products.
• Strong ability to orchestrate across external partners and internal teams with competing priorities.
• Direct experience with production LLM or ML inference.
• Experience with data and metrics and surfacing tradeoffs among latency, throughput, uptime, and cost.

Responsibilities

• Coordinate onboarding, launch readiness, and rollout for new models and capacity.
• Execute the roadmap for the inference platform—request handling, rate limits, quotas, and observability surface.
• Lead cross-functional delivery for inference-stack changes from planning through launch and post-launch validation.
• Build release mechanisms, dashboards, and launch checklists to keep inference releases low-risk.
• Partner with GPU capacity and compute teams to balance cost, capacity, and vendor constraints.

Skills

Technical program management

Product management

ML model serving

Distributed systems

Data metrics

Cost optimization

Vendor coordination

Job description

• Perplexity is looking for a technical program manager to be the connective tissue between our model providers, engineering, and product teams, driving our core inference platform forward
• Perplexity runs one of the highest-throughput inference stacks in the industry, serving Ask, Computer, and API traffic across a large and constantly shifting portfolio of first-party and third-party models
• This role sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and finance: you’ll orchestrate across model providers and internal teams to keep new models and capacity moving smoothly into production, while executing the roadmap for the inference platform itself
• Execute the roadmap for the inference platform — request handling, rate limits and quotas, usage controls, and the reliability and observability surface engineering and product teams depend on
• Be the connective tissue between model providers and Perplexity’s engineering and product teams — coordinating onboarding, launch readiness, and rollout for new models and capacity
• Drive latency, throughput, uptime, and cost-efficiency as core execution metrics, surfacing tradeoffs between them rather than letting them become side effects
• Run the operating model for model-release and optimization programs, including day-zero launches, across performance engineering, infrastructure, and product teams
• Lead cross-functional delivery for inference-stack changes, from planning through launch and post-launch validation
• Build the mechanisms that make releases predictable — rituals, dashboards, launch checklists — so inference releases stay low-risk at Perplexity’s scale
• Partner with GPU capacity and compute teams to reconcile execution decisions against cost, capacity, and vendor constraints

The ideal candidate has strong technical judgment, thrives coordinating across teams and external partners with competing timelines, and is energized by building the operating model for a function that doesn’t have much precedent yetComfort orchestrating across external partners and internal engineering teams with competing priorities and timelinesDirect experience with production LLM or ML inference — understanding what makes serving fast, reliable, and cheap rather than just what a roadmap slide says about itExperience with data and metrics, and the judgment to surface difficult tradeoffs between latency, throughput, uptime, and costThrives in a small, agile team; has initiative and desire for ownership without much precedent to lean on6+ years of combined technical program management or product management experienceStrong experience with technical program management or product management in infrastructure, distributed systems, or ML/model-serving products