Perplexity
Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agent Engine)
San Francisco, US
Role snapshot
Perplexity is hiring a Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, 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
- Posted
- Oct 26, 2026
Who this role suits
The listing does not state a required experience level here. Read the requirements in the description below and apply if they match your background.
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.
- Match your résumé to the requirements in the description, using the same wording where it is honest to do so.
- Prepare a short example for each requirement you meet, and be ready to explain any you only partly meet.
- 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 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.