Engineering Site Lead

Responsibilities

Site Leadership & Culture

• Establish and lead Perplexity's London office, setting its cultural foundation and operating principles.
• Build a collaborative, high-performance engineering culture aligned with company values and the London tech ecosystem.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for London-based activities and represent the site in company-wide strategic discussions.
• Partner with People/HR, Finance, and Operations to ensure seamless site operations.
• Drive local community engagement, partnerships, and brand presence in the London and European tech community.

Technical Leadership

• Directly manage and mentor one or more infrastructure or AI infrastructure teams in London, comprising 5–15+ engineers.
• Set technical direction and strategy for London-based infrastructure initiatives in alignment with company-wide goals.
• Drive architectural decisions and technical excellence across teams.
• Ensure robust systems for deployment, monitoring, scalability, and reliability of infrastructure supporting AI/ML workloads.
• Collaborate with global engineering leaders to align on technical standards, best practices, and cross-site initiatives.

Team Building & Talent

• Build and scale high-performing infrastructure and AI infrastructure teams through strategic hiring.
• Develop and execute a talent acquisition strategy for the London site in partnership with recruiting.
• Create career development frameworks and growth opportunities for engineers.
• Foster technical mentorship and knowledge sharing across teams and sites.

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Research teams globally to understand infrastructure needs and deliver solutions.
• Coordinate with other site leads and engineering leaders to ensure effective cross-site collaboration.
• Contribute to company-wide infrastructure strategy and roadmap planning.
• Facilitate knowledge transfer and best-practice sharing across global teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, including 5+ years in infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, or AI infrastructure roles.
• 3+ years of people-management experience, including building and scaling teams.
• Proven track record of establishing or significantly growing an engineering site or office.
• Deep technical expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and infrastructure automation.
• Experience supporting large-scale AI/ML systems, including GPU infrastructure and orchestration, ML training and inference pipelines, and model serving and deployment at scale.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes, Terraform, container orchestration, and CI/CD systems.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical vision and drive execution across multiple teams.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills.
• Experience working in fast-paced, high-growth technology companies.
• Passion for building inclusive, diverse, and high-performing teams.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience at companies focused on AI/ML, search, or large-scale consumer applications.
• Previous experience as a site lead, office lead, or similar multi-team leadership role.
• Background building infrastructure for LLM training or inference.
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or AI infrastructure projects.
• Experience scaling teams from 0 to 20+ engineers.
• Active involvement in the London or European tech community.
• MBA or advanced technical degree.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive compensation including equity.
• Comprehensive benefits package.
• Flexible work environment.