Perplexity

Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agent Engine)

San Francisco
Salary
$250K - $405K
Level
Staff

Not stated in the posting: work type, visa.

Open. First seen 26 October 2026.

About the role

Perplexity is seeking energetic engineers to join 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 an engineer on our Agent Engine team, you'll bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and a tinkerer's mindset to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users. You'll work across engineering and applied research to solve 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.

Qualifications

  • Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.
  • Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
  • Significant experience 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.
  • Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team; bias toward ownership.
  • A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.

What this role asks for

Particular to this role

Playwright

Rare in Perplexity's other 86 open postings.

Standard for software engineering roles

Python

Common in software engineering postings at any company.

Compared with Perplexity's other open jobs.

The team: AI Research & Systems HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 17 open in AI Research & Systems. 4 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in September: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.

WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS

Python (12 of 17), LLM (11 of 17), Machine Learning (8 of 17), Kubernetes (7 of 17), Rust (7 of 17), AWS (5 of 17), C++ (5 of 17)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

From the team and dates on Perplexity's own job board.

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