Member of Technical Staff (Applied AI Engineer, Agent Capabilities)
Perplexity2 months ago
Base Salary
$220k - $405k/yr
Responsibilities
- Evaluate frontier models against real user tasks, identify capabilities and failure modes, and take promising advances from prototyping through production launch and iteration.
- Improve agent planning, tool use, context management, error recovery, and reliable completion of long-running tasks.
- Design scalable agent capabilities including skills, plugins, artifact generation, auto-research, and multi-agent collaboration.
- Own agent behavior end-to-end across user-facing products, interfaces, backend services, evaluations, monitoring, and product iteration.
- Define offline and online evaluations for task completion, correctness, safety, latency, cost, and user satisfaction.
- Build secure, observable, and reliable agent systems with permissions, safeguards, tracing, replay, and monitoring infrastructure.
- Collaborate with Product Management, Data Science, and Research to identify opportunities and translate complex agent behaviors into reliable product experiences.
- Set technical direction, participate in design reviews, mentor others, and provide technical leadership on ambiguous problems.
Requirements
- Typically 6+ years of professional software engineering experience building and owning robust AI-powered, large-scale, user-facing, or data-intensive products.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience with AI/ML products, backend services, or distributed systems at scale.
- Experience owning the AI product lifecycle, including data analysis, rigorous evaluation, production monitoring, and iterative improvement.
- Ability to define metrics and use production data and user feedback to guide product decisions.
- Practical experience with one or more of agent harnesses, tool use, context engineering, model evaluation, browser automation, or long-running task execution.
- Strong product judgment and execution, including translating ambiguous user needs into applied AI or ML problems and shipping durable solutions with measurable impact.
- Genuine interest in frontier AI capabilities and agent systems.
- Preferred experience includes LLM context or harness engineering, subagents, coding assistants, autonomous task execution, agent safeguards, evaluation infrastructure, and production observability.
- Preferred qualifications include experience with mid-training, post-training, reinforcement learning, AI/ML research, publications, open-source contributions, or work at a fast-growing startup.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Perplexity
Perplexity builds an AI-powered answer engine for web and mobile and an enterprise product, Perplexity Computer, for AI-driven workflows across tools and apps. The company monetizes through individual subscriptions (Perplexity Pro) and enterprise plans. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, it operates as a privately held company.