Level

Perplexity

Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Computer)

Perplexity is hiring a Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Computer) in San Francisco, United States. It pays $220k-$405k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Perplexity.

Level's read on this job

  • On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
  • The listed pay starts 31% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include Python, Go and TypeScript.
  • Level classifies it as a mid-level role.
  • Level lists 131 other open roles at Perplexity.

AI in this role

Build products and systems for Perplexity Computer, focusing on agentic AI, context, and retrieval systems.

pythongotypescriptjavascriptkotlinswiftrustjavacllms
software-engineeringai-agentsretrieval-systemssystem-architecture

By applying to this role, you will be considered for engineering roles across all teams at Perplexity.

We are hiring builders to join our highly leveraged engineering team for creating new products that innovate and accelerate human productivity

In 2026, we launched Computer, the defining product for the new era of agentic AI. We’ve scaled beyond the millions of people using Perplexity every day for research, shopping, investing and curiosity into a new paradigm of using AI to transform knowledge into action.

As an engineer at Perplexity, your role will be to build products and systems that define how AI empowers humans to think, decide and act. You’ll ship fast and work between product, infrastructure and frontier level advancements in technology.

Why Perplexity is Different

  • Craftsmanship. We build high quality, tasteful products targeting both the AI native and AI curious.

  • Ownership. You identify the problem, design the solution and ship it.

  • Entrepreneurship. We think like founders, act with urgency, and hustle to deliver for each other and our users.

  • Scholarship. Work among highly talented peers, pursuing knowledge and truth, upleveling ourselves, our teams, and our products.

  • Partnership. We amplify each others’ strengths, break down silos, and give selflessly to help our colleagues deliver excellence.

What you'll do

  • Design, build, and own product and platform systems for Computer

  • Lead features, projects and products end-to-end, from problem definition to technical design, implementation, and launch.

  • Hill climb on hard problems, continuously iterating to improve for ourselves and customers.

  • Partner closely with engineers, product managers, designers, data scientists, and go-to-market teams.

  • Build systems that take into account the nuances of AI, working with agents, context, evaluation, personalization and the ground truth.

Qualifications

  • 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.

  • Strong experience in at least one general-purpose programming language such as Python, Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, Kotlin, Swift, Rust, Java, or C++.

  • Experience building and operating production systems at a meaningful scale.

  • Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions.

  • Genuine interest and adoption of AI products and willingness to learn quickly.

Nice to have

  • Experience with LLMs, agents, retrieval systems, personalization, or evaluation frameworks.

  • Time spent at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team.

  • Founded a company or initiative.

Our Mission

Perplexity’s mission is to power curiosity. Curious people are the people who drive change in the world. Driving change is a continuous cycle of learning, building, and integrating.

Learn: curious people constantly learn new things by asking more. They question the status quo in their own expertise and they constantly learn outside of it. Research is essential to them and never ending.

Build: curious people make and create things, to show the world their new answers to problems no one else ever questioned. They take action on what they’ve learned. Makers need tools to create their products, their companies, their reality.

Integrate: they must interact with the world as it is to drive change and adoption. True leaders do not simply build something and hope. They must have armies of agents and workers who can constantly work in millions of small ways.

Repeat. For curious people this is a cycle that never ends.

How we rate this

Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Computer) at Perplexity rates 85 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.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ 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.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Software EngineeringAI agentsRetrieval SystemsSystem ArchitecturePythonGoTypeScriptJavaScript

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$220k
Typical software engineer job
$168k

This posting starts 31% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a project where software engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
  2. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  3. Tell me about a project where retrieval systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where system architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Walk me through how you've used Python in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Software Engineering, AI agents, Retrieval Systems, System Architecture, and Python. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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