Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Multimodal)

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, real-time 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.

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.

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 real-time 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 real-time data.
• Some experience or familiarity with Rust or C++