Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agent Engine)
Perplexity is hiring a Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agent Engine) in San Francisco, United States. It pays $250k-$405k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Perplexity.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The listed pay starts 49% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- Level classifies it as a lead role.
- Level lists 131 other open roles at Perplexity.
- The role was posted in the last few days.
AI in this 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.
How we rate this
Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agent Engine) at Perplexity rates 97 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $250k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 49% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
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