Member of Technical Staff (AI Software Engineer, Agents)
Perplexity · San Francisco, CA
$220,000–$405,000
Jul 16, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
An engineering role on an AI agents team, focused on building and advancing agentic products that can navigate digital environments and carry out tasks on behalf of users. Work spans applied research and engineering — including action model training, context engineering, browser automation, and secure agent design — across desktop, mobile, and cloud environments. Suited to engineers with broad AI product stack experience and depth in at least one of post-training/RL, tool interfaces, or browser technologies.
Senior level · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
Posted 4 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,600 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 1,200–2,100
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (5)
The role sits at the intersection of applied AI research and product engineering — it could plausibly be classified as Data Scientists (15-2051) given the post-training, RL, and multimodal modeling work, but the dominant framing is shipping agentic product features, so Software Developers is the primary classification.
Location is inferred as San Francisco Bay Area based on Perplexity's known headquarters; the posting does not explicitly state a location or remote policy.
Python is the only language listed under Qualifications with firm language ('Proficiency in'); TypeScript, Go, and Rust are explicitly called out as 'bonus points' and are marked preferred accordingly.
The three specialization areas (context/tool engineering, post-training/RL, browser technologies) are framed as 'significant experience in at least one of' — meaning no single sub-skill is individually required. Playwright, CDP, and reinforcement learning are surfaced as representative preferred skills from those tracks rather than hard gates.
No compensation, degree, or clearance requirements are stated in the posting.
Read the full posting
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