Engineering Manager (API Platform)

About the role

Perplexity API Platform Perplexity 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. From 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.

What you'll do

• Provide both technical and team leadership across multiple layers of our rapidly growing API business.
• Design, build, and operate mission-critical APIs that provide our customers the building blocks for frontier intelligence.
• Continually reimagine the customer needs of tomorrow (and the architectures to serve those needs), while faithfully serving the customer workloads of today.
• Drive product reliability, code quality, AI evaluation, testing, and maintenance for the broader team.
• Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a rapidly growing team; develop rigorous interview pipelines and work closely with recruiting to source candidates.
• Collaborate across teams to incorporate novel frontier capabilities into the API Platform and improve existing capabilities for API customer needs.
• Track and ensure progress toward top-line business goals, in close coordination with engineering and business executives.

What they're looking for

✦ Select any requirement to ask Aptiora about your fit, evidence or application.

• Entrepreneurial attitude; able and eager to run more than just engineering.
• Proficiency in Python (bonus points for Go and/or Rust).
• Strong understanding of high-traffic API design: schema evolution & versioning, idempotency, authentication patterns, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
• Experience with modern AI APIs (including latency tuning, streaming, model orchestration, emerging technical standards) is a strong plus.
• Strong customer empathy and product sense, ensuring the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt for developers and agents alike.
• Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects; ability to guide highly-opinionated teams in making sound tradeoffs and prioritization decisions is critical.
• Experience managing engineering teams, including recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent.
• 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 of those years as an engineering manager.