Engineering Manager for Multimodal (AI)

Location: On-site in San Francisco or Palo Alto, United States

Salary: $300,000–$405,000 USD annually, plus equity

Company

Perplexity develops AI products for research, shopping, investing, and knowledge discovery, including agentic AI experiences.

What you will do

• Lead the team building realtime voice and multimodal experiences from prototype through production launch.
• Own the roadmap for voice and vision experiences and the infrastructure supporting them.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineers while managing performance and technical ownership.
• Shape the architecture connecting user voice input with models, tools, agents, and long-running tasks.
• Guide systems through latency, reliability, session recovery, and scaling challenges under load.
• Partner with SDK, client, infrastructure, and model teams to ship audio and vision capabilities across applications.

Requirements

• Experience managing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• Strong software engineering background in backend or distributed systems.
• Experience designing and operating production services in rapidly scaling environments using AWS or similar cloud infrastructure.
• Track record of shipping complex projects, strong product judgment, and clear cross-functional communication.
• Experience with Rust, Python, Go, or similar programming languages; the team primarily uses Rust and Python.
• Ability to work on-site in San Francisco or Palo Alto, United States.

Nice to have

• Experience with realtime media systems, voice, audio streaming, WebRTC, or low-latency transport.
• Experience integrating LLMs, speech models, or computer vision into production systems.
• Experience with agent frameworks, tool-calling architectures, or sandboxed execution environments.
• Experience leading projects across backend services, client SDKs, and user-facing applications.
• Experience at a fast-growing startup or in a high-ownership environment.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time U.S. employees receive equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care benefits.
• Benefits for employees outside the U.S. are tailored to their region of residence.
• Work focuses on high-ownership development of voice, vision, and agentic AI products.