Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agent Engine)
at Perplexity
Location
San Francisco
Compensation
$250k–$405k USD
Type
full time
Posted
Yesterday
Market range · company + function + seniority
p25 · target · p75 · n=41
Posted $405k · in the market band
Tailor your résumé to this role in 30 seconds.
Free account · ATS keyword check · per-job bullet rewrite by Claude.
Job description
Perplexity is seeking energetic engineers to join our highly driven Agent Engine team. The Agent Engine team designs and builds powerful agentic experiences including Perplexity Computer, the Comet ecosystem, our Agent API, and more. In short, we build frontier intelligence systems for the world's most discerning users.
As an engineer on our Agent Engine team, you'll 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'll work across engineering and applied research to solve many open problems in AI, including:
Designing frontier agent harnesses and systems to perform high-stakes, mission-critical work for our users;
Leveraging action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives;
Providing consistently excellent experiences across local execution, headless cloud, custom executors, and other environments through sound system design and flexible abstractions;
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.
Qualifications
Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.
Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
Significant experience in at least one of the following areas:
Harness engineering
Agent Skills and plugin architectures
Model training and reinforcement learning
Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
Strong technical intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team; bias toward ownership.
A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.
More open roles at Perplexity
Hiring velocity, headcount trend, and every open posting on one page.
Similar roles
Open postings ranked by description similarity — useful if this role isn't quite right.
- Software Engineer, Agent Runtime78% matchSierra· San Francisco, CA· $230k–$390k USD
- Principal Engineer, Agentic AI Systems77% matchInflection AI· Palo Alto, California, United States· $400k–$550k USD
- Staff Software Engineer, Enterprise AI77% matchRiot Games· Los Angeles, USA· $193k–$269k USD
- Staff Software Engineer, Agent Platform77% matchReplit· Foster City, CA· $250k–$365k USD
- Software Engineer, Product Infrastructure - Agent Runtime77% matchOpenAI· San Francisco· $266k–$445k USD
- Engineering Manager (Agent Engine)95% matchPerplexity· San Francisco· $300k–$485k USD· same company