Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Multimodal)

About Perplexity

Perplexity's mission is to power curiosity. The company focuses on a continuous cycle of learning, building, and integrating to drive change in the world.

About the Role

Perplexity is hiring builders to join the Multimodal AI group, an industry-leading team defining the next generation of human-AI interaction. As an engineer on the Multimodal AI team, you will work across the stack to build product experiences and platform systems that enable communication with AI through voice, images, video, and new modalities yet to be invented.

The stack spans immersive UIs, realtime audio processing, evaluation systems, backend infrastructure, and supporting libraries and SDKs. Your strengths and interests will be matched to 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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++