Multimodal Engineering Manager - Real-time Voice & Vision

Perplexity; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity seeks an Engineering Manager for Multimodal in Palo Alto to lead realtime voice and multimodal experiences. You will hire and grow engineers, set technical direction, and drive products at the intersection of voice, vision, and agents.

You will own the team's roadmap, shape architecture from user input to models, tools, and agents, and guide production services through latency and scaling challenges in a fast-moving startup setting.

Qualifications

• Experience managing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• Strong software engineering background in backend or distributed systems.
• Experience designing and operating production services in scalable environments on AWS or similar cloud infrastructure.
• Track record of leading teams to ship complex projects in a fast-moving environment.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into clear technical priorities.
• Clear communication and the ability to work effectively across teams.
• Experience with Rust, Python, Go, or similar languages; we work primarily in Rust and Python.
• Nice to have: experience with realtime media systems, or integrating LLMs, speech models, or computer vision into production systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team building realtime voice and multimodal experiences from prototype to production launch.
• Own the team's roadmap, deciding which voice and vision experiences to build next and what infrastructure they need to succeed.
• Hire and develop engineers, giving them ownership of meaningful technical problems and the feedback to grow.
• Shape the architecture behind the full voice experience, from a user speaking into a device to models, tools, and agents responding.
• Lead the systems that turn live conversations into action, connecting voice models to tools, agents, and long-running tasks.
• Guide the team through the latency, reliability, and scaling challenges of live voice, including session recovery and performance under load.
• Partner with SDK, client, infrastructure, and model teams to turn new audio and vision capabilities into experiences people can use across our apps.
• Use user feedback and production performance to improve the experience after launch and decide where the team should invest next.

Skills

Engineering management

Backend or distributed systems

AWS or cloud infrastructure

Leading complex projects

Product judgment

Cross-team communication

Rust/Python/Go experience

Job description

Perplexity seeks an Engineering Manager for Multimodal in Palo Alto to lead realtime voice and multimodal experiences. You will hire and grow engineers, set technical direction, and drive products at the intersection of voice, vision, and agents.

You will own the team's roadmap, shape architecture from user input to models, tools, and agents, and guide production services through latency and scaling challenges in a fast-moving startup setting.