What are the responsibilities and job description for the Member of Technical Staff (Engineering Lead, Developer Experience) position at Perplexity AI?
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. The true measure of success is to turn those solutions into elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike.
Our 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.
About this role
Perplexity is seeking an energetic leader to oversee developer experience across our API Platform. In this role, you'll own the full arc of how developers discover, adopt, and succeed with Perplexity's APIs.
You'll combine strong technical expertise with a high bar for craft and a passion for community building. You will personally serve as the face of Perplexity to developers, who will come to trust you as a champion for their needs and priorities. The initiatives you lead will bolster Perplexity as the platform of choice for developers seeking to build performant, efficient, and accurate AI systems.
What you'll do
What we're looking for
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. The true measure of success is to turn those solutions into elegant APIs that delight developers and agents alike.
Our 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.
About this role
Perplexity is seeking an energetic leader to oversee developer experience across our API Platform. In this role, you'll own the full arc of how developers discover, adopt, and succeed with Perplexity's APIs.
You'll combine strong technical expertise with a high bar for craft and a passion for community building. You will personally serve as the face of Perplexity to developers, who will come to trust you as a champion for their needs and priorities. The initiatives you lead will bolster Perplexity as the platform of choice for developers seeking to build performant, efficient, and accurate AI systems.
What you'll do
- Oversee the developer experience portfolio across Perplexity API Platform.
- Craft and curate our developer-facing presence across docs, SDKs, CLIs, MCPs, and Agent Skills, with meticulous taste and attention to detail.
- Build and nurture a thriving developer community that evangelizes Perplexity's API offerings and broadens conceptions of what's possible.
- Represent the voice of the developer by maintaining a panoptic understanding of customer priorities, success patterns, and friction points.
- Lead public engagement across developer events, social media, forums, and other high-signal channels.
- Foster an ecosystem of community resources and examples that set the standard for how each API offering can be most effectively used.
- Define metrics for developer health and satisfaction, and drive continuous improvement across our API Platform.
- Run workshops, hackathons, and other participatory programs to convert curiosity into tinkering, tinkering into deployment, and deployment into customer wins.
- Partner with fellow technical staff, GTM, support, and other cross-functional collaborators to ensure developers succeed across every industry and deployment scale.
What we're looking for
- Substantial experience working on or adjacent to developer-facing products in a technical capacity, preferably with a track record of growing adoption.
- Strong empathy for developers across experience levels and technology stacks (past developer relations experience is highly relevant).
- Detailed and accurate mental model of the developer ecosystem: in particular, how developers learn about, evaluate, and select API products.
- Well-calibrated taste for API ergonomics; experience prototyping and developing API-based products end-to-end.
- Sound understanding of the modern AI technical stack, major players/technologies at each layer, and differentiation opportunities.
- Strong written and oral communication skills, with particular savviness in developer-facing mediums (technical articles, documentation, conference talks, social media, etc.).
- Ability to balance aggressive use of frontier AI agents with the need for personality and taste.
- High intrinsically-enforced standards for the craft and quality of your work; an eagle eye for imperfection and rough edges (you complain before our customers do).
- Eagerness and comfort to wear many hats in service of a world-class developer experience.
Salary : $220,000 - $405,000