Technical Program Manager, Inference Platform Partnerships

Apply; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking a technical program manager to bridge model providers, engineering, and product teams, driving the core inference platform forward from roadmap to production. You will orchestrate across external partners and internal groups to keep new models and capacity moving smoothly, while building a scalable operating model for this growing function.

The role requires strong technical judgment, cross-team coordination, and a hands-on approach to balancing latency, throughput, uptime,

Qualifications

• Strong experience with technical program management or product management in infrastructure, distributed systems, or ML/model-serving products.
• Direct experience with production LLM or ML inference, understanding latency, reliability and cost.
• Comfort orchestrating across external partners and internal engineering teams with competing priorities and timelines.
• Experience with data and metrics, and the judgment to surface difficult tradeoffs between latency, throughput, uptime, and cost.
• Thrives in a small, agile team; has initiative and desire for ownership without much precedent.
• 6+ years of combined technical program management or product management experience.

Responsibilities

• 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

Skills

Technical program management

ML inference

Cross-team coordination

Data & metrics

Ownership mindset

6+ years experience

Job description

Perplexity is seeking a technical program manager to bridge model providers, engineering, and product teams, driving the core inference platform forward from roadmap to production. You will orchestrate across external partners and internal groups to keep new models and capacity moving smoothly, while building a scalable operating model for this growing function.

The role requires strong technical judgment, cross-team coordination, and a hands-on approach to balancing latency, throughput, uptime,