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Member of Technical Staff - AI Software Engineer - Agent Engine

Perplexity · San Francisco · United States

Contract
Full time
Occupation
Software Engineer

Posted: 10/31/2026 · Last checked: 11/10/2026

Job description

Quoted in full from Perplexity's job posting. Gavroche does not edit it.

Perplexity is seeking energetic engineers to join our highly driven Agent Engine team. The Agent Engine team designs and builds powerful agentic experiences including Perplexity Computer, the Comet ecosystem, our Agent API, and more. In short, we build frontier intelligence systems for the world's most discerning users.

As an engineer on our Agent Engine team, you'll bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and a tinkerer's mindset to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users. You'll work across engineering and applied research to solve many open problems in AI, including:

  • Designing frontier agent harnesses and systems to perform high-stakes, mission-critical work for our users;

  • Leveraging action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives;

  • Providing consistently excellent experiences across local execution, headless cloud, custom executors, and other environments through sound system design and flexible abstractions;

  • Developing permission architectures, payload classifiers, and other methods to implement secure-by-design agentic capabilities;

  • Designing optimal data representations and modes of interaction between agents and their environments;

  • and much, much more.

Qualifications

  • Strong foundational familiarity with the AI systems stack.

  • Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).

  • Significant experience in at least one of the following areas:

    • Harness engineering

    • Agent Skills and plugin architectures

    • Model training and reinforcement learning

    • Browser technologies (CDP, Playwright, extension development, etc.)

  • Strong technical intuition and taste for user experience excellence.

  • Comfortable working with a small, fast-moving team; bias toward ownership.

  • A passion for shipping products that surprise and delight.

From Gavroche data

Figures computed from live adverts on Gavroche; the job text above is the employer's.

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Middle half: 187,500 – 242,054 USD a year; median 212,500 USD.

From 234 adverts by 51 employers that state a salary, annualised.

How software engineer roles in the United States are worked

2% fully remote · 2% hybrid · 96% do not say

Of 773 adverts. An advert that does not state a work mode is counted as not saying, not as on-site.

New openings in San Francisco, by week

  1. 8/17/2026 238
  2. 8/24/2026 272
  3. 8/31/2026 346
  4. 9/7/2026 302
  5. 9/14/2026 373
  6. 9/21/2026 438
  7. 9/28/2026 527
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  10. 10/19/2026 454
  11. 10/26/2026 485
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5,112 openings over 12 weeks, by the week they were published.

Other roles at Perplexity

59 open, including roles outside the United States.