Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Computer)
Perplexity · On-site
MeritLog read this listing from Perplexity's Ashby job board and last checked it on September 10, 2026.
Source: the employer's Ashby job board. Open the original listing for current details.
Job details
- Work model
- On-site
- Salary
- $220K - $405K
- Location
- San Francisco
Hiring context
How this role compares at Perplexity
Perplexity has 114 live roles in MeritLog’s catalog across 11 job families, and 41 of them are in engineering. 97 of those listings publish a pay range, a disclosure rate of 85%.
This role's posted range of $220K - $405K sits above 69% of the 96 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
- Design, build, and own product and platform systems for Computer
- Lead features, projects and products end-to-end, from problem definition to technical design, implementation, and launch.
- Hill climb on hard problems, continuously iterating to improve for ourselves and customers.
- Partner closely with engineers, product managers, designers, data scientists, and go-to-market teams.
- Build systems that take into account the nuances of AI, working with agents, context, evaluation, personalization and the ground truth.
What they're asking for
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.Experience
- Strong experience in at least one general-purpose programming language such as Python, Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, Kotlin, Swift, Rust, Java, or C++.Skill
- Experience building and operating production systems at a meaningful scale.Skill
- Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions.Skill
- Genuine interest and adoption of AI products and willingness to learn quickly.Skill
- Experience with LLMs, agents, retrieval systems, personalization, or evaluation frameworks.SkillPreferred
- Time spent at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team.SkillPreferred
- Founded a company or initiative.SkillPreferred
Parsed by MeritLog from the employer’s own posting. The full description follows below.
Job description
By applying to this role, you will be considered for engineering roles across all teams at Perplexity. WE ARE HIRING BUILDERS TO JOIN OUR HIGHLY LEVERAGED ENGINEERING TEAM FOR CREATING NEW PRODUCTS THAT INNOVATE AND ACCELERATE HUMAN PRODUCTIVITY In 2026, we launched Computer, the defining product for the new era of agentic AI. We’ve scaled beyond the millions of people using Perplexity every day for research, shopping, investing and curiosity into a new paradigm of using AI to transform knowledge into action. As an engineer at Perplexity, your role will be to build products and systems that define how AI empowers humans to think, decide and act. You’ll ship fast and work between product, infrastructure and frontier level advancements in technology. WHY PERPLEXITY IS DIFFERENT - Craftsmanship. We build high quality, tasteful products targeting both the AI native and AI curious. - Ownership. You identify the problem, design the solution and ship it. - Entrepreneurship. We think like founders, act with urgency, and hustle to deliver for each other and our users. - Scholarship. Work among highly talented peers, pursuing knowledge and truth, upleveling ourselves, our teams, and our products. - Partnership. We amplify each others’ strengths, break down silos, and give selflessly to help our colleagues deliver excellence. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Design, build, and own product and platform systems for Computer - Lead features, projects and products end-to-end, from problem definition to technical design, implementation, and launch. - Hill climb on hard problems, continuously iterating to improve for ourselves and customers. - Partner closely with engineers, product managers, designers, data scientists, and go-to-market teams. - Build systems that take into account the nuances of AI, working with agents, context, evaluation, personalization and the ground truth. QUALIFICATIONS - 4+ years of professional software engineering experience. - Strong experience in at least one general-purpose programming language such as Python, Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, Kotlin, Swift, Rust, Java, or C++. - Experience building and operating production systems at a meaningful scale. - Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions. - Genuine interest and adoption of AI products and willingness to learn quickly. NICE TO HAVE - Experience with LLMs, agents, retrieval systems, personalization, or evaluation frameworks. - Time spent at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team. - Founded a company or initiative. OUR MISSION Perplexity’s mission is to power curiosity. Curious people are the people who drive change in the world. Driving change is a continuous cycle of learning, building, and integrating. Learn: curious people constantly learn new things by asking more. They question the status quo in their own expertise and they constantly learn outside of it. Research is essential to them and never ending. Build: curious people make and create things, to show the world their new answers to problems no one else ever questioned. They take action on what they’ve learned. Makers need tools to create their products, their companies, their reality. Integrate: they must interact with the world as it is to drive change and adoption. True leaders do not simply build something and hope. They must have armies of agents and workers who can constantly work in millions of small ways. Repeat. For curious people this is a cycle that never ends.