# Member of Technical Staff (Applied AI Engineer, Agent Capabilities) **Company**: Perplexity Computer **Location**: San Francisco **Experience**: senior **Job type**: Full time **Salary**: $220K - $405K **Category**: Engineering **Industry**: Technology **Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity/5c561bd0-c180-4ee1-b079-647f3c20bdc0?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply **Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_586b4c5b-147 ## Description We are seeking a Member of Technical Staff (Applied AI Engineer, Agent Capabilities) to join our AI Products team. The Agent Capabilities team sits at the intersection of frontier AI research and product innovation, building the foundations that shape how users and agents solve increasingly complex tasks. As a key member of this team, you will evaluate frontier models against real user tasks, identify useful behaviors and failure modes, and turn the most promising advances into production agent systems. **Responsibilities** - Evaluate frontier models against real user tasks, identify useful behaviors and failure modes, and turn the most promising advances into production agent systems. Own the lifecycle from rapid prototyping and evaluation through launch, monitoring, and iteration. - Improve agents’ ability to plan, use tools, manage context, recover from errors, and complete long-running tasks reliably. - Apply state of the art ML and LLM techniques to design scalable agent capabilities such as skills, plugins, artifact generation, tools integrate and use, auto-research, and multi-agent collaboration. Shape the architecture, abstractions, and product experiences that enable both users and agents to compose increasingly sophisticated solutions for real-world tasks. - Own agent behavior and capabilities end-to-end, from user-facing products and interfaces to backend services. Define offline and online evaluations for task completion, correctness, safety, latency, cost, and user satisfaction. Iteratively improve across models, prompts, harnesses, and products for different problem spaces. - Build secure, observable, and reliable agent systems, including permissions and safeguards for sensitive actions. Develop tracing, replay, and monitoring infrastructure that makes agent failures reproducible and actionable. - Collaborate closely with PM, Data Science, Research, to identify high-impact opportunities in understanding and validating emerging model capabilities, and turn complex agent behaviors into simple, reliable product experiences. - Apply relevant advances in models, inference, evaluation, and agent architecture when they produce measurable improvements in production performance. Set technical direction on ambiguous problems and raise the bar through design reviews, mentorship, and technical leadership. **Qualifications** - Typically 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of building and owning robust AI-powered, large-scale, user-facing or data-intensive products. Exceptional candidates with less experience and an outstanding record of impact are encouraged to apply. - Strong software engineering fundamentals, with experience building and operating AI/ML products, backend services, or distributed systems at scale. - Experience owning the AI product lifecycle, including data analysis, rigorous evaluation, production monitoring, and iterative improvement. Able to define metrics and use production data and user feedback to guide decisions. - Practical experience in one or more relevant areas, such as agent harnesses, tool use, context engineering, model evaluation, browser automation, or long-running task execution. - Strong product judgment and execution: you can translate ambiguous user needs into applied AI or ML problems and ship durable solutions with measurable user impact. - Genuine interest in frontier AI capabilities, agent systems, and excitement for rapidly exploring, evaluating, and productizing new model behaviors. **Nice to have** - Experience with LLM context engineering or harness engineering, experience with subagents, coding assistants, long-running or autonomous task execution. - Deep familiarity with the strengths and limitations of current model families across reasoning, tool use, context management, and long-horizon tasks. - Experience building agent permissions, safeguards, evaluation infrastructure, or production observability systems. - Experience with mid-training, post-training, or reinforcement learning for frontier or open-source models, along with a strong understanding of model strengths and limitations across reasoning, tool use, context management, and long-horizon tasks. - AI/ML research experience demonstrated through publications, open-source contributions, or other meaningful research impact. - Time spent at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team. **Compensation** - $220K – $405K • Offers Equity **Benefits** - Full-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more. - Full-time employees outside the U.S. enjoy a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region of residence. ## Skills ### Required - Python - Go - Rust - PostgreSQL - DynamoDB - AWS - TypeScript - AI - ML - LLM ### Nice to have - LLM context engineering - harness engineering - subagents - coding assistants - long-running task execution - agent permissions - safeguards - evaluation infrastructure - production observability systems - mid-training - post-training - reinforcement learning --- Source: [Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity/5c561bd0-c180-4ee1-b079-647f3c20bdc0?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)