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Perplexity is seeking a Tech Lead Manager (TLM) to lead and grow the Agents engineering team, which consists of AI/ML, backend, and full-stack engineers building agentic experiences within the Comet ecosystem. The vision is to empower users with AI agents that can faithfully actualize 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 for millions of users. You will lead a rapidly growing team tackling open problems in AI, including designing agents to navigate the digital world and perform valuable work, training action and decision models based on 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 for agent-environment interactions.
Key responsibilities include providing technical leadership across multiple layers of a rapidly growing AI agents product, developing and leveraging cutting-edge AI models and infrastructure to advance capability frontiers 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 with rigorous interview pipelines, 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, particularly 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
About Perplexity AI
AI / Data / Infrastructure — AI answer engine and search product for consumers and enterprises.