Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022 and growing rapidly as one of the world’s leading AI platforms. Perplexity has raised over $1B in venture investment from some of the world’s most visionary and successful leaders, including Elad Gil, Daniel Gross, Jeff Bezos, Accel, IVP, NEA, NVIDIA, Samsung, and many more. Our objective is to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making for people and assistive AI wherever decisions are being made. Throughout human history, change and innovation have always been driven by curious people. Today, curious people use Perplexity to answer more than 780 million queries every month–a number that’s growing rapidly for one simple reason: everyone can be curious.
Perplexity is seeking a Machine Learning / Software Engineering Manager to lead the AI Products team to build our AI Products spanning from the Comet Browser Agent, to the Deep Research Search Agent to integrating our core search experience with frontier capabilities like MCP as well as integrating different vertical end-to-end experiences like Travel, Shopping, Finance.
Responsibilities- Provide engineering leadership across multiple layers of rapidly growing products in the agents space.
- Leverage your experience in post-training deep foundational models with prompting to provide the best Research agent experience for both the Perplexity core search as well as the Browser.
- Drive product reliability, code quality, testing, and maintenance for the broader team.
- Oversee hiring, onboarding and ensure strong research and engineering practices for a rapidly growing team. Develop rigorous interview pipelines and work closely with recruiting to source candidates.
- Collaborate closely with the Core Research / Post-Training, Inference and Search teams.
- Interface with the Perplexity co-founders to deliver a top priority strategic objective for the company and industry.
- Strong foundational familiarity with Deep Learning, Agents Products, Evals, as well as the open source training stack.
- Have a strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
- Ability to make hard technical and research tradeoffs as well as remove research and engineering blockers.
- Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects.
- Experience managing medium size teams of engineers.
- Experience leveraging the right combination of open source and in-house solutions.
- 9+ years of general engineering experience.
- 3+ years of ML / deep learning experience.
- 5+ years of engineering management experience.
- Familiarity with SFT, Preference Optimization algorithms, Reinforcement Learning
- Fair understanding of statistics, probability, evaluations, and A/B testing.
Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including, experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Top Skills
Perplexity San Francisco, California, USA Office
575 Market St. SF 4th Floor, San Francisco, California, United States, 94105
Similar Jobs
What you need to know about the San Francisco Tech Scene
Key Facts About San Francisco Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 365,500; 13.9% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Google, Apple, Salesforce, Meta
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, consumer technology, software
- Funding Landscape: $50.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins
- Research Centers and Universities: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; Ames Research Center; Center for AI Safety; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
