Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Acceleration)

Perplexity is seeking creative, AI-pilled engineers to join our Acceleration team. The Acceleration team's mandate is to continually up-level the way our company and our teams operate, to deliver order-of-magnitude improvements in product and user experience. The ideal candidate will possess sound technical judgment forged in the trenches of internet-scale companies, paired with voracious use of today’s most advanced AI tools/models and a capacious imagination to rethink how work gets done.

Responsibilities

Identify, prioritize, and execute on the highest-potential opportunities to accelerate Perplexity’s delivery cadence with frontier AI capabilities; Develop empathy for the nuances of our technical and business teams’ work across disciplines and verticals, toward collaborating with them to harness AI in new ways; Make our codebases, systems, and knowledge stores legible to AI; Help the company triangulate toward the optimal point on the quality-velocity Pareto frontier, while shifting that frontier outward with AI tools and agents; Keep abreast of new AI tools/models and make maximally effective use of them in your own work, setting an example across the company and inspiring others to do the same; Help the company make high-conviction bets on specific technologies in situations where indecision is a comfortable and tempting default; Work with engineering leadership, recruiting, and others to ensure we instill an AI-forward culture and select for those who will thrive in such an environment

Requirements

5 to 15+ years of industry experience, ideally with a substantial portion focused on infrastructure/platform engineering or developer acceleration in environments featuring significant technical complexity; Daily use of AI models/tools, along with strong intuition on their jagged frontiers; Proficiency with Python, along with experience and/or desire to learn more about Rust, TypeScript, Go, and other languages; Strong understanding of (and empathy for) the work of technical staff across disciplines, along with an enthusiasm to learn about the work of business and operations teams; Broad working knowledge of the typical stacks used by AI product & applied research companies; An obsession with improving the legibility of (and reducing brittleness in) both software and human-orchestrated processes; Experience navigating tricky exploration-exploitation tradeoffs, balancing the need to ship today with the need to build capacity for tomorrow