Engineering Manager (Agent Engine)
At a glance
Manager-level Engineering Leadership role at Perplexity. San Francisco · full-time · $300,000–$485,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Guide technical decisions across the Agent Engine product, from system design through product roadmaps
- Help the team extend AI agent capabilities and scale them for a growing user base
- Keep the broader team focused on reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing and maintenance
- Hire, onboard and mentor engineers, while building interview processes with recruiting
- Work with the co-founders to deliver strategic technical goals
What you bring
- At least eight years of engineering experience, including three or more years managing engineering teams
- A strong grasp of AI systems and proficiency in Python
- Depth in at least one area such as agent harnesses, plugin architectures, model training or browser technologies
- Experience recruiting, developing and retaining strong engineering talent
Who this fits
This role suits an engineering manager with AI systems expertise, sound product judgment and experience leading technical teams. The position is based in San Francisco.
From the employer
Perplexity is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead and grow our highly driven Agent Engine team. The Agent Engine team designs and builds powerful agentic experiences including Perplexity Computer, the Comet ecosystem, our Agent API, and more. In short, we build frontier intelligence systems for the world's most discerning users.
As the engineering manager supporting the Agent Engine team, you'll bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and strong leadership and collaboration skills to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users. You'll lead, grow, and support a team in solving many open problems in AI, including:
Designing frontier agent harnesses and systems to perform high-stakes, mission-critical work for our users;
Leveraging action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives;
Providing consistently excellent experiences across local execution, headless cloud, custom executors, and other environments through sound system design and flexible abstractions;
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 systems and related 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 AI systems stack.
Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
Domain knowledge in at least one of the following areas:
Harness engineering
Agent Skills and plugin architectures
Model training and reinforcement learning
Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
Strong technical intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
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.
Engineering Leadership work from LinkedIn, X, Reddit and Upwork, in one list.
Each morning you get everything that fits, strongest first.
Engineering Leadership$300k+
Find me workBy the team behind techroles.