staff software engineering Staff Engineer tech_leadership · Posted Apr 13, 2026
$220,000 – $405,000
USD per year

About this role

Perplexity is hiring a staff-level Staff Engineer in the software engineering function based in San Francisco, CA. The posting calls out experience with Python, TypeScript, Rust, Reinforcement Learning. Compensation is listed at $220,000–$405,000 per year.

Role
Staff Engineer
Function
software engineering
Level
staff
Track
Tech leadership
Employment
Full-time
Location
San Francisco, CA
Department
AI
Posted
Apr 13, 2026
AI Summary
Mid-level engineer developing AI agents for Perplexity's platform, working on model training, browser automation, and agentic capabilities. Requires strong Python proficiency, AI product stack knowledge, and expertise in context engineering, post-training/RL, or browser technologies.

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Job description

from Perplexity careers

Perplexity is seeking an energetic engineer to join our highly driven Agents engineering team. The Agents team consists of AI/ML, backend, and full-stack engineers who collaborate to build delightful agentic experiences within our Comet ecosystem and Perplexity Computer, our platform for generalized frontier intelligence. Our vision is to empower our users with AI agents that can faithfully actualize their intent, however and wherever expressed, through open-ended interactions with the world.

As an engineer on our Agents team, you will 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 will work across applied research and engineering to solve many open problems in AI, including:

  • Designing AI agents to navigate the digital world and perform increasingly valuable units of work for our users;

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

  • Providing consistently excellent experiences across desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other environments through flexible abstractions and frictionless backgrounding;

  • 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;

    This is an excerpt. Read the full job description on Perplexity careers →
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