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Perplexity is seeking a Tech Lead Manager (TLM) to lead and grow the Agents engineering team, which comprises AI/ML, backend, and full-stack engineers building agentic experiences within the Comet ecosystem. The vision is to empower millions of users with AI agents that can faithfully execute their intent through open-ended interactions with the world.
As the Agents TLM, you will combine AI expertise, product intuition, and engineering management skills to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish. You will lead a team solving open problems in AI, including: designing agents to navigate the digital world and perform valuable work for users; training action and decision models that determine how to accomplish user-specified objectives based on complex multimodal states; delivering consistent experiences across desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other environments; implementing secure-by-design agentic capabilities through permission architectures and payload classifiers; and designing optimal data representations and interaction modes between agents and their environments.
Key responsibilities include providing technical leadership across multiple product layers in the AI agents space; developing and leveraging cutting-edge AI models, infrastructure, and browser technologies to advance capability and scale for a growing userbase; exercising sharp technical and product intuition to guide system architectures and product roadmaps; driving product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance; overseeing hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a rapidly growing team; developing rigorous interview pipelines and sourcing candidates with recruiting; and interfacing with Perplexity co-founders to deliver strategic objectives that redefine what's possible in AI.
Requirements:
- 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 years as an engineering manager
- Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack
- Proficiency in Python (bonus: TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust)
- Domain expertise in at least one of: context engineering and tool interfaces for frontier AI models; post-training and reinforcement learning (particularly for multimodal models); or browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)
- Strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence
- Strong background and hands-on technical experience with frontier models, ideally relevant to open-world agents
- Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects; ability to guide highly-opinionated teams in making sound tradeoffs and prioritization decisions
- Experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent
