Engineering Manager (API Platform)
San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 17d ago
About the job
Perplexity is seeking a strong technical leader to steer the API Platform engineering team through a rapid period of growth. Our company builds technology that reshapes how people search, reason, and interact with the world around them. The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling programmatic interfaces to our technology. You and your team will work on an eclectic portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and frontier topics, prioritizing great developer and agent experience alike. This role is ideal for seasoned engineering managers who are unusually passionate about providing the world with programmatic access to the building blocks of frontier intelligence.
Responsibilities
- Provide technical and team leadership for the API Platform business.
- Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs for frontier intelligence.
- Anticipate future customer needs and design architectures to meet them, while serving current workloads.
- Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance.
- Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a growing team.
- Collaborate with other teams to integrate new AI capabilities into the API Platform.
- Track and ensure progress toward business goals in coordination with executives.
Requirements
- Entrepreneurial attitude and ability to manage more than just engineering.
- Proficiency in Python (Go and/or Rust are a plus).
- Strong understanding of high-traffic API design principles (schema evolution, versioning, idempotency, authentication, rate limiting, performance tuning).
- Experience with modern AI APIs (latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, technical standards) is a strong plus.
- Strong customer empathy and product sense for building ergonomic and well-documented APIs.
- Strong organizational skills for managing parallel technical projects and guiding team prioritization.
- Experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting, growing, and retaining talent.
- 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 years as an engineering manager.