Staff Engineer, Frontier AI Capabilities

Perplexity; California (MO); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking a senior software engineer for the Capabilities team to translate frontier AI breakthroughs into reusable product capabilities. You will own end-to-end delivery, from user-facing products to backend services, and help shape the architecture that enables both users and agents to solve increasingly complex tasks.

You will collaborate with PM, Design, Data Science, Sales and Research to identify high-impact opportunities, validate capabilities, and build production-grade

Qualifications

• Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proven record delivering complex products or systems end-to-end.
• Strong full-stack fundamentals and scalable systems experience.
• Excellent product judgment and ability to translate needs into reliable solutions.
• Data-informed decision making with defined metrics.

Responsibilities

• Investigate frontier-model behaviors and identify product opportunities.
• Build Skills, Workflows, and Artifacts into an ecosystem.
• Own capabilities end-to-end from user interfaces to backend ops.
• Build scalable platform infrastructure for capability execution.
• Collaborate with PM, Design, Data Science, Sales, Research.
• Set technical direction and lead through design reviews.

Skills

Full-stack

Product judgment

Data-driven

Abstractions

Ownership

Leadership

Ambiguity handling

Tools

Python

Go

PostgreSQL

DynamoDB

AWS

TypeScript

React

Job description

Perplexity is seeking a senior software engineer for the Capabilities team to translate frontier AI breakthroughs into reusable product capabilities. You will own end-to-end delivery, from user-facing products to backend services, and help shape the architecture that enables both users and agents to solve increasingly complex tasks.

You will collaborate with PM, Design, Data Science, Sales and Research to identify high-impact opportunities, validate capabilities, and build production-grade