Engineering Manager (AI Agents)

Location: San Francisco, United States

Salary: $300K–$485K USD annually; equity offered. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions.

Company

Perplexity develops AI-powered products and frontier intelligence systems for users worldwide.

What you will do

• Lead, grow, and provide technical leadership for the Agent Engine team building Perplexity Computer, the Comet ecosystem, the Agent API, and other agentic experiences.
• Design frontier agent harnesses and systems for high-stakes, mission-critical user work.
• Develop action and decision models for accomplishing objectives across complex multimodal states.
• Design reliable, flexible systems supporting local execution, headless cloud, custom executors, and other environments.
• Develop secure-by-design agentic capabilities, including permission architectures and payload classifiers, as well as data representations and interaction models between agents and environments.
• Guide system architecture, product roadmaps, product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, maintenance, hiring, onboarding, and mentorship; collaborate with recruiting and Perplexity co-founders on strategic objectives.

Requirements

• Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.
• Proficiency in Python.
• Domain knowledge in at least one of: harness engineering; agent skills and plugin architectures; model training and reinforcement learning; or browser technologies such as CDP, Playwright, and extension development.
• Strong technical intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
• Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects, guiding highly opinionated teams, and making sound trade-offs and prioritization decisions.
• Experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent.
• 8+ years of engineering experience, including at least 3 years as an engineering manager.

Nice to have

• Experience with TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust.

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.
• International salaries are set according to the local market.