About the Position

Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Acceleration)

Location

San Francisco, California; New York City, New York

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Platform & Infrastructure

Compensation

$250K – $405K • Offers Equity

About the Role

The AI Acceleration team at Perplexity is dedicated to making the company the best place to build and ship software with AI agents. We focus on developing the infrastructure that engineers and agents rely on, and creating new ways for agents to write, test, review, and ship code. Our mission is to help teams move from an idea to production faster, without compromising quality or reliability.

As an AI Acceleration Engineer, you will turn emerging agent capabilities into dependable systems used across Perplexity. You will work directly with engineers to understand where development slows down, experiment with new approaches, and take promising ideas through to production. This role combines systems engineering, developer experience, and hands-on agent development, with a direct measure of success: helping teams spend less time on delivery overhead and more time building products.

Responsibilities

Identify, prioritize, and deliver the highest-impact opportunities to accelerate how Perplexity builds and ships software with AI.
Work directly with engineering and business teams to understand their workflows, constraints, and bottlenecks, and build solutions that address how they actually work.
Build and operate the infrastructure that engineers and agents depend on, including development environments, build and test systems, code review, and release tooling.
Make our codebases, systems, and internal knowledge easier for agents to navigate, understand, and use through better tooling, interfaces, documentation, and context.
Take agent-driven workflows from prototype to production, building the evaluations, verification, and controls needed to delegate increasingly complex engineering work safely.
Improve delivery speed and software quality together. Measure the impact of your work on development time, review effort, and production reliability, and use those results to guide what comes next.
Evaluate emerging models, tools, and approaches through hands-on experimentation. Turn the evidence into clear technical decisions, and drive adoption of the technologies that prove useful.
Use AI extensively in your own engineering work, share what works, and help colleagues adopt effective practices. Partner with engineering leadership and recruiting to strengthen how we hire and develop engineers who work effectively with AI.

Requirements

5+ years of software engineering experience, ideally with substantial work in infrastructure, platform engineering, or developer productivity in technically complex environments.
Daily, hands-on use of AI models and coding tools, with practical judgment about where they perform well, where they fail, and how to verify their output.
Strong proficiency in one of the languages – Python, Go, or Rust, along with the willingness to learn other languages as the work requires.
Broad familiarity with the systems used by AI product and applied research teams, including cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, data pipelines, and ML tooling. You don’t need deep expertise in every layer, but you should understand how they fit together.
An ability to understand how engineers and researchers across disciplines work, paired with curiosity about the needs of business and operations teams. You build tools around users’ actual workflows and constraints.
A drive to make codebases, systems, and processes easier to understand, operate, and change. You look for ways to replace brittle workflows and implicit knowledge with clear interfaces and reliable automation.
Sound technical judgment about when to experiment, when to commit, and when to ship a pragmatic solution. You can balance immediate delivery with investments that make future work faster and more reliable.

We Offer

Competitive salary range: $250K – $405K
Comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care accounts.
Opportunities for professional growth and development.

About the Company

Perplexity is a leading company in the AI and software development space, dedicated to pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI agents. We are committed to fostering an innovative and inclusive environment where our team can thrive and make a significant impact.

Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Acceleration)

Job description