Engineering Manager, Perplexity AI
Commerce
$250-325k
+Equity
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Job no longer available
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$250-325k
+Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- 9+ years of software engineering experience
- 4+ years of engineering management experience including recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent
- 5+ years of engineering experience on payments or commerce systems at consumer-scale traffic and reliability
- Deep experience with Stripe, PayPal, or similar payment platforms
- Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects; ability to guide senior engineers in making sound tradeoffs and prioritization decisions
- Comfort with ambiguity; parts of this roadmap are still being written
- Track record of shipping reliable, compliant financial systems
Desirable
- Experience with building or integrating with 3rd party to support modern payment rails (ACH, open banking, real-time payments) and multi-rail architectures
- Experience supporting various monetization strategies including subscriptions, ads, and marketplace
- Experience dealing with fraud prevention solutions and systems
What the job involves
- Perplexity is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the team building the foundation for how commerce works in an AI-native world
- The Commerce team will own the full commerce stack: payments infrastructure, agentic commerce capabilities, and emerging monetization opportunities as we explore what's possible
- You will lead, grow, and support a team solving critical problems at the intersection of payments and AI, including:
- Building and scaling billing infrastructure across consumer subscriptions, enterprise plans, API usage (Sonar), and premium features
- Architecting agentic commerce capabilities that enable seamless in-conversation transactions
- Designing reliable, compliant financial systems that can scale with Perplexity's rapid growth
- Partnering with external partners to bring new commerce integrations to market
- Shaping future monetization strategies as we expand beyond existing revenue models
- You'll lead and grow a team of engineers building payments, billing, and commerce systems
- Own the technical roadmap for subscription infrastructure and payment integrations
- Drive architecture decisions for agentic commerce—defining how Perplexity facilitates transactions within conversational experiences
- Collaborate with product, finance, and external partners to ship new commerce capabilities
- Foster a high-performance engineering culture focused on reliability, velocity, and technical excellence
Our take
As AI continues to drive changes in both business operations and day-to-day lives, Perplexity AI delivers an intelligent search engine powered by conversational AI, to improve search outcomes and "unlock the power of knowledge" for all.
Reaching impressive heights of 22M monthly visits, Perplexity's "ask anything" method of search is clearly a popular one. And what sets it apart from other search engines is in its answers, which are concise and fully cited, responding to the user query rather than simply providing a place in which they can scroll to find it themselves.
The company has raised substantial funding, with contributions from former execs at companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Quora, demonstrating the interest that it has drummed up in the space. Having doubled its annual recurring revenue between 2023 and 24, this investment will allow Perplexity AI to continue building out its product, and accelerate growth into the future.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Sep 2025
$200m
LATE VC
Jul 2025
$100m
LATE VC
Total funding: $1.7bn
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Aravind Srinivas
(Co-Founder, President & CEO)Former Research Scientist at OpenAI, who has interned in Research at Google and Deep Mind. Obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Denis Yarats
(Co-Founder & CTO)Prior to co-founding Perplexity in 2022, Denis was an AI Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research, a Staff ML Engineer at Quora, and a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft.
Johnny Ho
(Co-Founder & CSO)Previously a Quantitative Trader at Tower Research Capital, and Engineer at Quora.
Salary benchmarks
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