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