Engineering Manager (API Platform)

About the role

The Perplexity API Platform brings our technology to the world's most discerning developers. From exabyte-scale knowledge indexes to codegen-first agent runtimes, the building blocks behind Perplexity's applications are some of the most battle-tested AI systems in the industry. We believe these same building blocks can and should power the aspirations of builders everywhere.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide both technical and team leadership across multiple layers of our rapidly growing API business.
• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
• Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today.
• 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.
• Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs.
• Track and ensure progress toward top-line business goals, in close coordination with engineering and business executives.

Qualifications

• Entrepreneurial attitude; able and eager to run more than just engineering.
• Proficiency in Python (bonus points for Go and/or Rust).
• Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
• Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards) is a strong plus.
• Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike.
• 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.

Compensation Range

$300K - $405K