Jobs · Engineering · California

Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Agent Capabilities)

Perplexity · San Francisco, CA · 5 days ago
HybridEngineering$220k–$405k/yrFull-time

What You'll Do

  • Investigate emerging frontier-model behaviors and identify opportunities to turn them into product capabilities.
  • Help define how advances in reasoning, planning, memory, learning, and agent collaboration appear in the product.
  • Build and evolve Skills, Workflows, and Artifacts into a coherent ecosystem.
  • Shape the architecture, abstractions, and product experiences that enable both users and agents to compose increasingly sophisticated solutions for complex real-world tasks.
  • Owes capabilities end-to-end, from user-facing products and interfaces to backend services, evaluation, data models, and production operations.
  • Build scalable platform infrastructure and backend systems that power capability execution, sharing, and lifecycle management across high volume user and agent interactions.
  • Collaborate closely with PM, Design, Data Science, Sales, Research, to identify high-impact opportunities in both consumer and enterprise customer experiences, validate emerging capabilities, and translate complex agent behaviors into simple, reliable product experiences.
  • Set technical direction on ambiguous problems and raise the bar through design reviews, mentorship, and technical leadership.

Qualifications

  • Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of owning and delivering complex products or systems from conception to production.
  • Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals, including experience building user-facing products, backend services, and scalable distributed systems that serve high traffic and large user bases.
  • Strong product judgment and instincts; you turn vague needs into simple, reliable systems and ship without waiting for perfect specs.
  • Comfort with data-informed decisions; you define the metrics and evals that prove a system works, and iterate on them.
  • Experience designing abstractions, platforms, or reusable systems that enable other engineers, users, or automated systems to accomplish complex tasks.
  • Strong execution: you can take ambiguous product needs, break them down, and ship durable systems with clear user impact.
  • Genuine interest in frontier AI capabilities, agent systems, and excitement for rapidly exploring, evaluating, and productizing new model behaviors.
  • Nice to have:
    • Experience building agentic systems (tool calling, subagents, long-running or autonomous task execution).
    • Experience building developer platforms or reusable-capability primitives (SDKs, plugin systems, workflow engines).
    • Experience with evaluation, benchmarking, or quality systems for ML/LLM-powered products.
    • Time spent at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team.

Compensation Range

$220K - $405K

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