Engineering Manager

About the role

Perplexity is looking for a technical leader to guide the API Platform team as we expand our programmatic access to frontier AI models. You will oversee the development of high-scale interfaces that enable enterprises and developers to integrate our search and reasoning capabilities into their own applications.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Lead the technical and personnel growth of the API Platform engineering team.
• Architect and manage mission-critical APIs that serve as the foundation for our customers AI workflows.
• Balance the maintenance of current workloads with the design of future-proof systems.
• Manage the full software lifecycle including reliability, testing, and AI evaluation standards.
• Build and scale the team by managing hiring pipelines, onboarding, and ongoing mentorship.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to integrate new AI capabilities into our public-facing platform.
• Align engineering output with business objectives through close coordination with executive leadership.

Requirements

• 8+ years of total engineering experience.
• 3+ years of experience in an engineering management role.
• Proven ability to lead teams through rapid growth and shifting technical requirements.
• Expertise in designing high-traffic APIs, including versioning, authentication, rate limiting, and performance optimization.
• Strong product intuition and a focus on developer experience.
• Entrepreneurial mindset with the ability to manage projects beyond core engineering tasks.

Nice to have

• Proficiency in Go or Rust.
• Direct experience with modern AI APIs, including model orchestration, streaming, and latency tuning.

Skills & tools

• Python
• Distributed systems
• API architecture
• Team management and recruiting

Practical notes

This position is based in San Francisco. We are looking for candidates who can manage complex, parallel technical projects while maintaining a high bar for code quality and team culture.