Member of Technical Staff

Key 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.
• Build both prototypes and production systems, as well as reengineer codebases, infrastructure, processes, and anything else that must evolve to realize this vision.

Qualifications

• 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.