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Member of Technical Staff (Applied AI Engineer, Agent Capabilities)

Perplexity· AI Products
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San Francisco, New York City$220k - $405kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Perplexity is seeking a Member of Technical Staff focused on applied AI, agent capabilities, and frontier model integrations. The role involves evaluating frontier models, building production-grade agent systems, and shaping architectures and product experiences at the intersection of frontier AI research and product innovation.

Responsibilities

  • Evaluate frontier models against real user tasks, identify useful behaviors and failure modes, and turn the most promising advances into production agent systems. Own the lifecycle from rapid prototyping and evaluation through launch, monitoring, and iteration.
  • Improve agents’ ability to plan, use tools, manage context, recover from errors, and complete long-running tasks reliably.
  • Apply state of the art ML and LLM techniques to design scalable agent capabilities such as skills, plugins, artifact generation, tools integrate and use, auto-research, and multi-agent collaboration. Shape the architecture, abstractions, and product experiences that enable both users and agents to compose increasingly sophisticated solutions for real-world tasks.
  • Own agent behavior and capabilities end-to-end, from user-facing products and interfaces to backend services. Define offline and online evaluations for task completion, correctness, safety, latency, cost, and user satisfaction. Iteratively improve across models, prompts, harnesses, and products for different problem spaces.
  • Build secure, observable, and reliable agent systems, including permissions and safeguards for sensitive actions. Develop tracing, replay, and monitoring infrastructure that makes agent failures reproducible and actionable.
  • Collaborate closely with PM, Data Science, Research, to identify high-impact opportunities in understanding and validating emerging model capabilities, and turn complex agent behaviors into simple, reliable product experiences.
  • Apply relevant advances in models, inference, evaluation, and agent architecture when they produce measurable improvements in production performance. Set technical direction on ambiguous problems and raise the bar through design reviews, mentorship, and technical leadership.

Qualifications

  • Typically 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of building and owning robust AI-powered, large-scale, user-facing or data-intensive products. Exceptional candidates with less experience and an outstanding record of impact are encouraged to apply.
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals, with experience building and operating AI/ML products, backend services, or distributed systems at scale.
  • Experience owning the AI product lifecycle, including data analysis, rigorous evaluation, production monitoring, and iterative improvement. Able to define metrics and use production data and user feedback to guide decisions.
  • Practical experience in one or more relevant areas, such as agent harnesses, tool use, context engineering, model evaluation, browser automation, or long-running task execution.
  • Strong product judgment and execution: you can translate ambiguous user needs into applied AI or ML problems and ship durable solutions with measurable user impact.
  • Genuine interest in frontier AI capabilities, agent systems, and excitement for rapidly exploring, evaluating, and productizing new model behaviors.

Skills

Required:frontier model evaluation and prototypingagent architecture and lifecycle ownershipcontext management and tool useevaluation infrastructure and observability

Benefits

  • Full-time U.S. benefits including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts
  • International benefits tailored to region of residence
Last updated Sep 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Perplexity

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