ML Engineering Manager (AI Products)

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Employment Type: Full-time

Position Overview

Perplexity is seeking a Machine Learning / Software Engineering Manager to lead the AI Products team. This role involves building AI Products, including the Comet Browser Agent, the Deep Research Search Agent, integrating core search with frontier capabilities like MCP, and developing end-to-end vertical experiences for Travel, Shopping, and Finance.

Responsibilities

• Provide engineering leadership across multiple layers of rapidly growing products in the agents space.
• Leverage experience in post-training deep foundational models with prompting to provide the best Research agent experience for both Perplexity core search and the Browser.
• Drive product reliability, code quality, testing, and maintenance for the broader team.
• Oversee hiring, onboarding, and ensure strong research and engineering practices for a rapidly growing team.
• Develop rigorous interview pipelines and work closely with recruiting to source candidates.
• Collaborate closely with the Core Research / Post-Training, Inference, and Search teams.
• Interface with the Perplexity co-founders to deliver a top priority strategic objective for the company and industry.

Requirements

• Strong foundational familiarity with Deep Learning, Agents Products, Evals, and the open-source training stack.
• Strong product intuition and taste for user experience excellence.
• Ability to make hard technical and research tradeoffs and remove research and engineering blockers.
• Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects.
• Experience managing medium-sized teams of engineers.
• Experience leveraging the right combination of open-source and in-house solutions.
• 9+ years of general engineering experience.
• 3+ years of ML / deep learning experience.
• 5+ years of engineering management experience.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with SFT, Preference Optimization algorithms, and Reinforcement Learning.
• Fair understanding of statistics, probability, evaluations, and A/B testing.

Company Information

At Perplexity, we've experienced tremendous growth and adoption since publicly launching the world's first fully functional conversational answer engine in 2022. We've grown from answering 2.5 million questions per day at the start of 2024 to around 20 million daily queries in December 2024. We also offer Perplexity Enterprise Pro, which counts leading companies like Nvidia, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Bridgewater, and Zoom as customers.

To support our rapid expansion, we've raised significant funding from some of the most respected technology investors. Our investor base includes IVP, NEA, Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Naval Ravikant, Tobi Lutke, and many other visionary individuals. In 2024, our employee base grew nearly 300%, and we're just getting started.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise, and may vary.
• Equity: In addition to the base salary, equity may be part of the total compensation package.
• Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents. Includes a 401(k) plan.

Application Instructions

Please refer to the original job posting for application instructions.