Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agent Engine)
At a glance
Senior AI Engineering role at Perplexity. San Francisco · full-time · $250,000–$405,000 base.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build agent systems for high-stakes tasks, including the harnesses and decision models that turn complex multimodal inputs into actions
- Design abstractions that support agent experiences across local, cloud-based and custom execution environments
- Create permission structures and payload checks to make agent capabilities secure by design
- Shape how agents represent information and interact with their environments
What you bring
- Strong working knowledge of the AI systems stack and proficiency in Python
- Deep experience in at least one area such as agent harnesses, plugin architectures, model training or browser technologies
- Sound technical judgment and a strong instinct for excellent user experiences
Who this fits
This role suits an engineer who likes owning work on a small, fast-moving team and shipping user-facing products. The position is based in San Francisco.
From the employer
Perplexity is seeking energetic engineers to join our highly driven Agent Engine team. The Agent Engine team designs and builds powerful agentic experiences including Perplexity Computer, the Comet ecosystem, our Agent API, and more. In short, we build frontier intelligence systems for the world's most discerning users.
As an engineer on our Agent Engine team, you'll bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and a tinkerer's mindset to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users. You'll work across engineering and applied research to solve many open problems in AI, including:
Designing frontier agent harnesses and systems to perform high-stakes, mission-critical work for our users;
Leveraging action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives;
Providing consistently excellent experiences across local execution, headless cloud, custom executors, and other environments through sound system design and flexible abstractions;
Developing permission architectures, payload classifiers, and other methods to implement secure-by-design agentic capabilities;
Designing optimal data representations and modes of interaction between agents and their environments;
and much, much more.
Qualifications
Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.
Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
Significant experience in at least one of the following areas:
Harness engineering
Agent Skills and plugin architectures
Model training and reinforcement learning
Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
Strong technical intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team; bias toward ownership.
A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.
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AI Engineering$250k+
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