Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agents)
At a glance
Senior AI Engineering role at Perplexity. San Francisco · full-time · $220,000–$405,000 base.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build agent harnesses that link AI models to the tools and environments users need for valuable work
- Advance AI features across the product, using models, infrastructure, and browser technology to extend agent capabilities
- Maintain a high quality bar for agent results and the experience users have with them
- Work with engineering, design, product, and data colleagues to connect core features with agent products
- Improve reliability, code quality, evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the team
What you bring
- A strong grasp of the full AI product stack and working proficiency in Python
- Deep experience in at least one area: model context and tool interfaces, post-training and reinforcement learning, or browser technology
- Good product judgment, a sharp eye for user experience, and readiness to take ownership on a fast-moving team
Who this fits
This senior role suits an engineer who can move between applied AI work and product engineering, and who enjoys shipping polished agent capabilities. The position is based in San Francisco.
From the employer
Perplexity is seeking energetic engineers to join our highly driven Agents engineering team. The Agents team consists of backend, full-stack, and AI/ML engineers who collaborate to build harnesses and AI systems powering delightful agentic experiences. These experiences include Perplexity Computer (our platform for generalized frontier intelligence), the Comet ecosystem, our Agent API, and more.
Our vision is to empower our users with agents that can faithfully actualize their intent, however and wherever expressed, through open-ended interactions with the world. As an engineer on our Agents team, you will 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 will work across applied research and engineering to solve many open problems in AI, including:
Designing AI agents to navigate the digital world and perform increasingly valuable units of work for our users;
Training action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives;
Providing consistently excellent experiences across desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other environments through flexible abstractions and frictionless backgrounding;
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.
Responsibilities
Engineer agent harnesses that connect powerful models with the environments and tools required to perform economically valuable work for users.
Drive cutting-edge AI capabilities across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space.
Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI models, infrastructure, and browser technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase.
Ensure a high craft and quality bar, in both AI agent performance and user experience.
Collaborate with fellow engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists, and others across the company to integrate core Perplexity functionality into our frontier agentic products and vice-versa.
Contribute to product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the broader team.
Qualifications
Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack.
Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
Significant experience in at least one of the following areas:
Context engineering and tool interfaces for frontier AI models
Post-training and reinforcement learning (particularly for multimodal models)
Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
Strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team, must be willing to dive in and take ownership.
A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.