Staff Applied AI Engineer: Frontier Models & Agents

Apply; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity Computer is building the next generation of agentic AI products. The Agent Capabilities team shapes frontier AI breakthroughs into reusable, high-quality experiences for users and agents.

You will own end-to-end agent behavior, leverage tools, and drive large-scale production systems across platforms. We value craftsmanship, ownership, and entrepreneurship, with a focus on measurable impact and rapid iteration in a highly collaborative environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience building AI-powered, large-scale products.
• Experience owning the AI product lifecycle from data analysis to production monitoring.
• Ability to translate user needs into durable AI/ML product solutions.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate frontier models against real tasks and turn advances into production agent systems.
• Improve agents’ planning, tool use, context management, and long-running task handling.
• Apply state-of-the-art ML/LLM techniques to design scalable agent capabilities and architectures.
• Own agent behavior end-to-end, set metrics, and drive iterative improvements.
• Build secure, observable agent systems with tracing and monitoring for reliability.
• Collaborate with PM, Data Science, and Research to identify high-impact opportunities.

Skills

Software engineering fundamentals

AI/ML products

Backend services

Distributed systems

Data analysis

Production monitoring

Metrics-driven decisions

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Python

Go

Rust

PostgreSQL

DynamoDB

AWS

TypeScript

Job description

Perplexity Computer is building the next generation of agentic AI products. The Agent Capabilities team shapes frontier AI breakthroughs into reusable, high-quality experiences for users and agents.

You will own end-to-end agent behavior, leverage tools, and drive large-scale production systems across platforms. We value craftsmanship, ownership, and entrepreneurship, with a focus on measurable impact and rapid iteration in a highly collaborative environment.