Tech Lead - Acceleration

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022 and growing rapidly as one of the world’s leading AI platforms. Perplexity has raised over $1B in venture investment from some of the world’s most visionary and successful leaders, including Elad Gill, Daniel Gross, Jeff Bezos, Accel, IVP, NEA, Nvidia, Samsung, and many more. Our objective is to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making for people and assistive AI wherever decisions are being made. Throughout human history, change and innovation have always been driven by curious people. Today, curious people use Perplexity to answer more than 780 million queries every month–a number that’s growing rapidly for one simple reason: everyone can be curious. 

Perplexity is seeking a singularly creative and energetic engineer to spearhead our Acceleration team as its founding tech lead. We are revolutionizing the way people navigate the internet and the wider world. To continue building best-in-class products, we are reimagining how our company and our teams operate.

Just as Perplexity is heralding an agentic future for the internet, you will lead our company in making the best use of AI tools and agents to multiply the leverage of our lean, mission-focused teams. Today, Perplexity uses AI tools across everything we do, from frontend and backend engineering to applied AI research and business operations. Tomorrow’s AI technology will be even more capable, and the Acceleration team will lead both software and process engineering to harness AI so that the company can deliver at maximum velocity.

The ideal candidate will possess sound technical judgment forged in the trenches of internet-scale companies, paired with voracious use of today’s most advanced AI tools/models and a capacious imagination to rethink how work gets done in the leading companies of tomorrow. They will provide hands-on technical leadership in a hybrid role that marries facets of AI product development, infrastructure/platform engineering, developer experience, and more.

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.
• Note: this is an extremely technical and hands-on role. Strong vision and thought leadership is necessary but not sufficient for success. You will be expected to build both prototypes and production systems, as well as to reengineer our codebases, infrastructure, processes, and anything else that must evolve to realize this vision.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of industry experience, ideally with a substantial portion focused on infrastructure/platform engineering or developer acceleration.
• Daily use of AI models/tools, along with strong intuition on their jagged frontiers.
• Proficiency with Python and working fluency with Typescript.
• 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. (For example: you don’t need to have experience hand-rolling CUDA kernels, but you should know what CUDA is and when/where/why it’s used.)
• 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.

The cash compensation range for this role is $250,000 - $325,000.

Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.
 
Equity: In addition to the base salary, equity may be part of the total compensation package.
Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents. Includes a 401(k) plan.