Agent Capabilities Engineer (AI)

Location: San Francisco or New York City, United States

Salary: $220,000–$405,000 per year plus equity. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are based on the local market.

Company

Perplexity develops AI products that help users transform knowledge into action, including agentic AI experiences used by millions of people.

What you will do

• Evaluate frontier models against real user tasks, identify useful behaviors and failure modes, and take promising capabilities from prototyping through production launch, monitoring, and iteration.
• Improve agent planning, tool use, context management, error recovery, and reliable execution of long-running tasks.
• Design scalable agent capabilities such as skills, plugins, artifact generation, auto-research, and multi-agent collaboration.
• Own agent behavior end to end across user-facing interfaces, backend services, models, prompts, evaluation harnesses, and products.
• Build secure, observable, and reliable agent systems with permissions, safeguards, tracing, replay, and monitoring infrastructure.
• Work with product management, data science, and research to turn emerging model capabilities into measurable product improvements.

Requirements

• Typically 6+ years of professional software engineering experience building robust AI-powered, large-scale, user-facing, or data-intensive products.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience operating 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.
• Practical experience with agent harnesses, tool use, context engineering, model evaluation, browser automation, or long-running task execution.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to translate ambiguous user needs into applied AI or ML solutions with measurable impact.
• Experience with relevant technologies including Python, Go, Rust, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, AWS, and TypeScript.

Nice to have

• Experience with subagents, coding assistants, autonomous task execution, or LLM harness engineering.
• Experience building agent permissions, safeguards, evaluation infrastructure, or production observability systems.
• Experience with mid-training, post-training, or reinforcement learning for frontier or open-source models.
• AI/ML research demonstrated through publications, open-source contributions, or other meaningful research impact.
• Experience at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time U.S. employees receive equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care benefits.
• Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive benefits tailored to their region of residence.
• Work emphasizes craftsmanship, ownership, entrepreneurship, scholarship, and partnership.
• Work alongside highly talented peers on frontier AI research, agent systems, platform engineering, and product innovation.