EngineeringNot provided by source

Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agents)

Perplexity · Not provided by source

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Last seen by MeritLog September 13, 2026Source: AshbySource version: ashby-public-job-posting-v1

MeritLog read this listing from Perplexity's Ashby job board and last checked it on September 13, 2026.

Source: the employer's Ashby job board. Open the original listing for current details.

Job details

Work model: Not provided by source
Salary: $220K - $405K
Location: San Francisco

Hiring context

How this role compares at Perplexity

Perplexity has 115 live roles in MeritLog’s catalog across 11 job families, and 41 of them are in engineering. 99 of those listings publish a pay range, a disclosure rate of 86%.

This role's posted range of $220K - $405K sits above 69% of the 98 other Perplexity roles quoted over the same currency and period.

Perplexity concentrates this hiring in:

Counted across the job boards MeritLog tracks, at the time this page was served. Pay comparisons use only listings that publish a complete range in the same currency and period.

What the role asks for

What you'd do

Engineer agent harnesses that connect powerful models with the environments and tools required to perform economically valuable work for users.
Drive cutting-edge AI capabilities across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space.
Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI models, infrastructure, and browser technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase.
Ensure a high craft and quality bar, in both AI agent performance and user experience.
Collaborate with fellow engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists, and others across the company to integrate core Perplexity functionality into our frontier agentic products and vice-versa.
Contribute to product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the broader team.

What they're asking for

Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack.Skill
Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).SkillPreferred
Significant experience in at least one of the following areas:Skill
Context engineering and tool interfaces for frontier AI modelsSkill
Post-training and reinforcement learning (particularly for multimodal models)Skill
Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)Skill
Strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence.Skill
Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team, must be willing to dive in and take ownership.Skill
A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.Skill

Parsed by MeritLog from the employer’s own posting. The full description follows below.

Job description

Perplexity is seeking energetic engineers to join our highly driven Agents engineering team. The Agents team consists of backend, full-stack, and AI/ML engineers who collaborate to build harnesses and AI systems powering delightful agentic experiences. These experiences include Perplexity Computer https://www.perplexity.ai/computer (our platform for generalized frontier intelligence), the Comet ecosystem https://www.perplexity.ai/comet, our Agent API, and more. Our vision is to empower our users with agents that can faithfully actualize their intent, however and wherever expressed, through open-ended interactions with the world. As an engineer on our Agents team, you will 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 will work across applied research and engineering to solve many open problems in AI, including: - Designing AI agents to navigate the digital world and perform increasingly valuable units of work for our users; - Training action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives; - Providing consistently excellent experiences across desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other environments through flexible abstractions and frictionless backgrounding; - 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. RESPONSIBILITIES - Engineer agent harnesses that connect powerful models with the environments and tools required to perform economically valuable work for users. - Drive cutting-edge AI capabilities across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space. - Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI models, infrastructure, and browser technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase. - Ensure a high craft and quality bar, in both AI agent performance and user experience. - Collaborate with fellow engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists, and others across the company to integrate core Perplexity functionality into our frontier agentic products and vice-versa. - Contribute to product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance across the broader team. QUALIFICATIONS - Strong foundational familiarity with the full AI product stack. - Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust). - Significant experience in at least one of the following areas: - Context engineering and tool interfaces for frontier AI models - Post-training and reinforcement learning (particularly for multimodal models) - Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.) - Strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence. - Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team, must be willing to dive in and take ownership. - A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.

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