Engineering Manager, Perplexity AI
API Platform
$300-405k
+ equity
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Be an early applicant
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$300-405k
+ equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- Entrepreneurial attitude; able and eager to run more than just engineering
- Proficiency in Python (bonus points for Go and/or Rust)
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning
- Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards) is a strong plus
- Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike
- 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
What the job involves
- Perplexity is seeking a strong technical leader to steer the API Platform engineering team through a rapid period of growth. Our company builds technology that reshapes how people search, reason, and interact with the world around them
- Week after week, we observe increasing demand for programmatic interfaces to that technology. The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling these interfaces
- You and your team will work on an eclectic portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and frontier topics that often change with each passing month
- Throughout this work, you'll prioritize great developer and agent experience alike. You'll also define technical strategy for how we scale to meet compounding growth exponentials (number of customers, agents per customer, compute/retrieval per agent, etc.)
- This role is ideal for seasoned engineering managers who are unusually passionate about providing the world with programmatic access to the building blocks of frontier intelligence
- Provide both technical and team leadership across multiple layers of our rapidly growing API business
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence
- Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today
- 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
- Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs
- Track and ensure progress toward top-line business goals, in close coordination with engineering and business executives
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: $1.8bn
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.
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