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Perplexity

Engineering Manager (Agent Engine)

San Francisco, US

Role snapshot

Perplexity is hiring a Engineering Manager (Agent Engine) on a full-time basis. This is a role based in San Francisco, US. The listing highlights AI Research & Systems.

Company
Perplexity
Location
San Francisco, US
Job type
Full-time
Experience
8+ years
Posted
Oct 27, 2026

Who this role suits

Experienced professionals who can lead projects, set direction and be accountable for outcomes, not just tasks.

How to prepare your application

  • Check your résumé against the listed skills (AI Research & Systems) and give each one a concrete example: what you built or achieved, not just that you used it.
  • Prepare examples of decisions you drove, how you measured the result, and how you worked with other teams.
  • Be ready to discuss trade-offs and scope, not only the tools you have used.
  • Read what Perplexity publishes about its product or team, so you can say clearly why this role and this company.

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About the role

Perplexity is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead and grow 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 the engineering manager supporting the Agent Engine team, you'll bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and strong leadership and collaboration skills to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users. You'll lead, grow, and support a team in solving 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.

Responsibilities

  • Provide technical leadership across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space.

  • Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI systems and related technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase.

  • Exercise sharp technical & product intuition to guide the team’s system architectures and product roadmaps.

  • Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance for the broader team.

  • Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a rapidly growing team. Develop rigorous interview pipelines and work closely with recruiting to source candidates.

  • Interface with the Perplexity co-founders to deliver strategic objectives that redefine what’s possible in the AI industry.

Qualifications

  • Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.

  • Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).

  • Domain knowledge 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.

  • Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects; ability to guide highly-opinionated teams in making sound tradeoffs and prioritization decisions is critical.

  • Experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent.

  • 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 of those years as an engineering manager.