Engineering Manager (agents)

at Perplexity · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · AI

Engineering Manager to lead and grow an AI Agents team focused on building agentic experiences within the Comet ecosystem. The role involves technical leadership, developing AI models and infrastructure, driving product reliability and evaluation, and managing a growing team to advance the capabilities of AI agents for users.

What you'd actually do

  1. Provide technical leadership across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space.
  2. Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI models, infrastructure, and browser technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase.
  3. Exercise sharp technical & product intuition to guide the team’s system architectures and product roadmaps.
  4. Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance for the broader team.
  5. Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a rapidly growing team. Develop rigorous interview pipelines and work closely with recruiting to source candidates.

Skills

Required

  • Python
  • Context engineering and tool interfaces for frontier AI models
  • Post-training and reinforcement learning (particularly for multimodal models)
  • Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
  • Strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
  • Strong background and hands-on technical experience with frontier models
  • Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects
  • 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.

Nice to have

  • TypeScript
  • Go
  • Rust

What the JD emphasized

  • ability to guide highly-opinionated teams in making sound tradeoffs and prioritization decisions is critical

Other signals

  • leading AI agents team
  • building agentic experiences
  • empower users with AI agents
  • advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish
Read full job description

Perplexity is seeking a TLM (Tech Lead Manager) to lead and grow our highly driven Agents engineering team. The Agents team consists of AI/ML, backend, and full-stack engineers who collaborate to build delightful agentic experiences within our Comet ecosystem. Our vision is to empower our users with AI agents that can faithfully actualize their intent, however and wherever expressed, through open-ended interactions with the world.

As the Agents TLM, you will bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and strong engineering management skills to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users. You will lead, grow, and support a team in solving many open problems in AI, including:

  • Designing AI agents to navigate the digital world and perform increasingly valuable units of work for our users;
  • Training action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives;
  • Providing consistently excellent experiences across desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other environments through flexible abstractions and frictionless backgrounding;
  • 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 models, infrastructure, and browser 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 full AI product stack.

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

  • Domain expertise in at least one of the following areas:

    • Context engineering and tool interfaces for frontier AI models
    • Post-training and reinforcement learning (particularly for multimodal models)
    • Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)

  • Strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence.

  • Strong background and hands-on technical experience with frontier models (the more relevant to open-world agents, the better).

  • 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.