Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Multimodal)

Department: AI Research & Systems

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $220K – $405K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

Perplexity is hiring builders to join our Multimodal AI group, an industry-leading team defining the next generation of human-AI interaction. Our team is creating experiences that move beyond the touch interface, allowing people to communicate with AI through the form factors that best meet their needs. These include through voice, images, video, or new modalities we have yet to invent.

As an engineer on the Multimodal AI team, you will work across the stack to build the product experiences and platform systems that make this possible across our applications. Our stack spans immersive UIs, realtime audio processing, evaluation systems, backend infrastructure, and supporting libraries and SDKs. We’ll work with you to match your strengths and interests to the areas where you can drive the most impact, while collaborating as a team to turn ambiguous, bleeding-edge problems into reliable experiences for users.

Why Perplexity is Different

• Craftsmanship. We build high quality, tasteful products targeting both AI native and AI curious users.

• Ownership. You identify the problem, design the solution and ship it.

• Entrepreneurship. We think like founders, act with urgency, and hustle to deliver for each other and our users.

• Scholarship. Work among highly talented peers, pursuing knowledge and truth, upleveling ourselves, our teams, and our products.

• Partnership. We amplify each others’ strengths, break down silos, and give selflessly to help our colleagues deliver excellence.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and own product and multimodal platform systems for Perplexity.

• Lead features, projects and products end-to-end, from problem definition to technical design, implementation, and launch.

• Hill climb on hard problems, continuously iterating to improve for ourselves and customers.

• Partner closely with engineers, product managers, designers, data scientists, and go-to-market teams.

• Build systems that take into account the nuances of multimodal AI.

• Work closely with client verticals to integrate new features into their stack.

What we're looking for

• Experience building and operating production systems at a meaningful scale.

• Ability to work up and down the stack, from deep systems primitives to getting the pixels and prompts just right.

• Strong product judgment and the ability to translate user problems into simple, effective technical solutions.

• Genuine interest and adoption of multimodal AI products and willingness to learn quickly.

• Ability to think through novel problems and implement companion long-term solutions that scale.

Nice to have

• Background including work with realtime audio or video processing.

• Experience with audio stack technologies including audio processing modules (APMs), echo cancellation, noise reduction/cancellation, automatic-gain control (AGC), etc.

• Experience with immersive UIs integrating with realtime data.

• Some experience or familiarity with Rust or C++

Our Mission

Perplexity’s mission is to power curiosity. Curious people are the people who drive change in the world. Driving change is a continuous cycle of learning, building, and integrating.

Learn: curious people constantly learn new things by asking more. They question the status quo in their own expertise and they constantly learn outside of it. Research is essential to them and never ending.

Build: curious people make and create things, to show the world their new answers to problems no one else ever questioned. They take action on what they’ve learned. Makers need tools to create their products, their companies, their reality.

Integrate: they must interact with the world as it is to drive change and adoption. True leaders do not simply build something and hope. They must have armies of agents and workers who can constantly work in millions of small ways.

Repeat. For curious people this is a cycle that never ends.