{"id":97850,"url":"https://alion.io/job/perplexity-ai-engineering-manager-api-platform","title":"Engineering Manager (API Platform)","company":{"id":3,"name":"Perplexity AI","domain":"perplexity.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/perplexity","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":80,"open_postings":35,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.8,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":45,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":300000,"max":405000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":405000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Perplexity","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":true},{"name":"Rust","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-12T04:49:36Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-15","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T22:55:32Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":65,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":65},"description":"Perplexity API Platform\nPerplexity innovates at the frontier of AI infrastructure, search, and orchestration to serve the world's most discerning users. The Perplexity API Platform brings our technology to the world's most discerning developers.\nFrom exabyte-scale knowledge indexes to codegen-first agent runtimes, the building blocks behind Perplexity's applications are some of the most battle-tested AI systems in the industry. We believe these same building blocks can and should power the aspirations of builders everywhere. It's one thing to solve planet-scale retrieval, long-horizon orchestration, and other foundational AI challenges within a single product ecosystem. The true measure of success is to turn those solutions into elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike.\nOur API Platform delivers frontier intelligence to thousands of customers: startups, trillion-dollar enterprises, U.S. and allied governments, and everyone in between. We've achieved incredible scale, yet we're just getting started. Join us to build tools for curious minds.\nAbout this role\nPerplexity 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. Week after week, we observe increasing demand for programmatic interfaces to that technology. The API Platform engineering team is charged with designing, implementing, and scaling these interfaces.\nYou and your team will work on an eclectic portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and frontier topics that often change with each passing month. Throughout this work, you'll prioritize great developer and agent experience alike. You'll also define technical strategy for how we scale to meet compounding growth exponentials (number of customers, agents per customer, compute/retrieval per agent, etc.).\nThis 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.\nKey Responsibilities\nProvide both technical and team leadership across multiple layers of our rapidly growing API business.\n\nDesign, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.\n\nContinually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today.\n\nDrive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance for the broader team.\n\nOversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a rapidly growing team; develop rigorous interview pipelines and work closely with recruiting to source candidates.\n\nCollaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs.\n\nTrack and ensure progress toward top-line business goals, in close coordination with engineering and business executives.\n\nQualifications\nEntrepreneurial attitude; able and eager to run more than just engineering.\n\nProficiency in Python (bonus points for Go and/or Rust).\n\nStrong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.\n\nExperience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards) is a strong plus.\n\nStrong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike.\n\nStrong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects; ability to guide highly-opinionated teams in making sound tradeoffs and prioritization decisions is critical.\n\nExperience managing engineering teams, including recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent.\n\n8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 of those years as an engineering manager.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4099,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["LLM & Generative AI","Search Engines","Foundation Models","AI Search"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-12T04:49:36Z"},{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-30T14:50:22Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 18","filings_12m":18,"filings_prev_12m":10,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":212500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":1}],"liveness":{"score":21,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.476,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":65,"expected_fill_days":45,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":405000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/perplexity-ai-engineering-manager-api-platform","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/perplexity-ai-engineering-manager-api-platform.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T01:12:27Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1656,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":3},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fperplexity-ai-engineering-manager-api-platform"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fperplexity-ai-engineering-manager-api-platform"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fperplexity-ai-engineering-manager-api-platform"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/perplexity-ai-engineering-manager-api-platform\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fperplexity-ai-engineering-manager-api-platform"}]}