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Perplexity is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead the API Platform engineering team through rapid growth. The API Platform delivers frontier AI intelligence to thousands of customers—from startups to trillion-dollar enterprises and government agencies—through elegant, developer-friendly APIs.
In this role, you will provide both technical and team leadership for a rapidly growing engineering organization. Your responsibilities include designing, building, and operating mission-critical APIs that serve as the programmatic interface to Perplexity's frontier AI capabilities. You'll work across a diverse technical portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and emerging AI infrastructure challenges.
Key responsibilities:
- Lead and grow a high-performing engineering team through hiring, onboarding, mentorship, and rigorous interview processes
- Design and operate APIs that prioritize both developer and agent experience, with deep focus on reliability, code quality, and testing
- Define technical strategy for scaling across multiple dimensions: customer growth, agents per customer, and compute/retrieval per agent
- Drive product decisions that balance serving today's customer workloads while architecting for tomorrow's needs
- Collaborate cross-functionally to incorporate frontier capabilities into the platform and improve existing offerings
- Track progress toward business goals in close coordination with engineering and business leadership
Required qualifications:
- 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 years as an engineering manager
- Proficiency in Python; experience with Go and/or Rust is a plus
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution, versioning, idempotency, authentication, rate limiting, and performance tuning
- Experience managing and growing engineering teams
- Strong organizational skills for managing parallel technical projects and guiding teams through prioritization decisions
- Customer empathy and product sense; ability to ensure APIs are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt
Bonus qualifications:
- Experience with modern AI APIs, including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, and emerging technical standards
- Entrepreneurial mindset and willingness to operate beyond pure engineering
About Perplexity AI
AI / Data / Infrastructure — AI answer engine and search product for consumers and enterprises.
