Scale Engineer

Engineering Manager (Enterprise)

Engineering Manager · Manager · Full Time

San FranciscoUSD 300k – 405k5d ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Lead enterprise platform engineering at Perplexity AI, combining technical excellence with people leadership to scale AI adoption across Fortune 500 organizations. This role requires deep expertise in enterprise control planes, data platforms, or connector ecosystems, along with proven ability to build and mentor high-performing engineering teams while delivering mission-critical infrastructure that enables secure, compliant, and reliable enterprise AI deployment.

Responsibilities

  • Technical Strategy & Architecture Leadership: Set technical direction for enterprise platform teams and guide critical architecture decisions across identity and access management, data synchronization, and connector ecosystems. Ensure all systems meet enterprise-grade reliability, security, and scalability requirements while translating complex customer needs into executable technical priorities and clear tradeoff decisions.
  • Enterprise Platform Development: Build foundational enterprise infrastructure including SSO/SCIM integration, role-based access control, customer-managed encryption keys (BYOK), admin APIs, audit logging, and data governance frameworks. Establish security and compliance foundations that enable large organizations to deploy Perplexity with confidence while meeting SOC 2, HIPAA, and industry-specific regulatory requirements.
  • Product Roadmap & Strategy: Partner with product and design leadership to shape enterprise platform roadmaps, applying strong technical judgment and deep product intuition. Represent engineering perspectives in strategic customer conversations, working closely with sales and customer success teams to understand market requirements and remove technical adoption barriers.
  • Reliability & Quality Excellence: Set high standards for code quality, automated testing, system reliability, and long-term maintainability across the enterprise platform. Lead incident response efforts, oversee safe rollout of platform changes and connector migrations, and implement comprehensive monitoring and observability to ensure customers' critical workflows remain robust and stable.
  • Cross-Team Collaboration & Integration: Collaborate with engineering teams across Perplexity to ensure enterprise platforms are extensible, well-documented, and easy to integrate. Build and maintain platform APIs and SDKs that empower other teams to build on enterprise foundations while adhering to security, governance, and performance standards.
  • Team Leadership & Talent Development: Build, mentor, and scale a rapidly growing team of senior and mid-level engineers focused on enterprise platforms. Develop rigorous interview processes and recruiting pipelines; conduct regular 1:1s focused on feedback and career development; retain high-caliber talent through clear growth opportunities and technical challenges; ensure diverse hiring and inclusive team culture.
  • Executive Alignment & Communication: Work directly with Perplexity co-founders to align on enterprise engineering priorities, communicate technical progress against strategic initiatives, and advocate for necessary engineering investments. Translate between technical complexity and business impact for non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Enterprise Platform Architecture

    Deep expertise in designing and building enterprise-grade systems with proven experience in identity and access management, authentication protocols (SSO, SCIM), authorization frameworks, or encryption key management. Understanding of how these systems integrate across distributed architectures.

  • Security & Compliance Engineering

    Hands-on experience implementing security controls, audit logging systems, and compliance frameworks for regulated industries. Familiarity with SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, data residency requirements, and creating automated compliance monitoring and analytics dashboards for enterprise administrators.

  • Data Integration & Connector Platforms

    Experience building or scaling connector platforms, API-first integrations, or data synchronization systems. Familiarity with managing authentication across external systems, permission-aware data access, real-time data freshness challenges, and reliability at scale with multiple third-party dependencies.

  • Distributed Systems & Scalability

    Strong foundation in building scalable backend systems that serve enterprise workloads at scale. Experience with microservices architecture, API design, asynchronous processing, data consistency models, and performance optimization under high concurrency.

  • AI/ML Platform Integration

    Experience integrating machine learning models or AI systems into production enterprise products. Understanding of semantic search, knowledge graphs, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, and how to make enterprise data accessible to AI applications while maintaining security and governance.

Education

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field

    Formal education in computer science, computer engineering, mathematics, or closely related technical discipline. Equivalent professional experience may substitute, but strong fundamental CS knowledge is expected for enterprise platform architecture work.

Experience

  • Engineering Management Leadership

    Minimum 4+ years of hands-on engineering management experience building and mentoring teams of 5-20+ engineers. Proven track record developing junior and mid-level engineers, conducting technical interviews, building inclusive teams, and retaining high-performing talent through career development and mentorship.

  • Enterprise Software Development

    8+ years of total software engineering experience with substantial focus on building enterprise products and platforms. Shipped production systems used by enterprise customers; understand the distinction between consumer-grade and enterprise-grade reliability, security, and compliance requirements.

  • Enterprise Customer Engagement

    Direct experience representing engineering in customer conversations, translating enterprise requirements into technical specifications, and understanding the sales cycle and adoption challenges specific to Fortune 500 customers. Experience removing technical blockers for customer success and enterprise adoption.

  • High-Growth Startup Environment

    Experience scaling engineering organizations in fast-moving startup environments where priorities shift rapidly. Ability to balance shipping speed with long-term code quality, and to hire and onboard experienced engineers while under growth pressure. Familiarity with infrastructure-heavy startups.

  • Incident Response & Operational Excellence

    Hands-on experience leading incident response for mission-critical systems, implementing post-mortems, driving architectural improvements based on reliability lessons, and building on-call culture and tooling that keeps systems robust.

Skills

Required

  • Technical Judgment & Decision Making

    Ability to evaluate competing technical approaches and make sound architecture decisions under time pressure. Skilled at identifying critical technical risks, assessing long-term maintainability, and making clear tradeoffs between speed and quality.

  • Team Leadership & Mentorship

    Proven ability to inspire and develop engineering talent, run effective 1:1s, provide clear feedback, create psychological safety, and build team culture. Experience scaling teams as they grow and maintaining quality throughout scaling.

  • Systems Thinking & Design

    Strong ability to think in systems, design extensible platforms, and understand how components interact across complex distributed architectures. Skilled at identifying bottlenecks, designing APIs, and creating abstractions that hide complexity.

  • Customer & Business Acumen

    Ability to translate enterprise customer requirements into technical priorities. Understanding of enterprise buying cycles, regulatory drivers, and how technical decisions impact sales cycles and customer adoption.

  • Communication & Storytelling

    Excellent communication skills across diverse audiences: executive leadership, engineers, product teams, and enterprise customers. Ability to articulate technical complexity clearly, explain tradeoffs, and build consensus on priorities.

  • Quality & Reliability Focus

    Obsessive attention to detail and quality standards. High tolerance for operational complexity and commitment to building systems that customers can depend on for critical workflows. Driven by building robust, maintainable, well-tested code.

  • Recruiting & Hiring Excellence

    Hands-on recruiting skills with ability to source, interview, and hire senior engineers. Experience building diverse teams and creating interview processes that assess technical depth and cultural fit effectively.

Preferred

  • AI/ML Product Experience

    Nice to have

    Previous experience building or scaling AI-powered products, working with machine learning teams, or understanding how to integrate ML systems into production applications at enterprise scale.

  • Identity & Access Management Expertise

    Nice to have

    Deep specialization in IAM, SSO, SCIM, OAuth/OpenID Connect, or role-based access control systems. Experience implementing enterprise authentication and authorization frameworks for large organizations.

  • Enterprise Data Platform Experience

    Nice to have

    Background building data integration platforms, ETL systems, data connectors, or semantic data layers. Familiarity with data freshness challenges, permission-aware access patterns, and reliability at scale.

  • Compliance & Regulated Industry Experience

    Nice to have

    Background working with regulated industries (healthcare, finance, government). Experience implementing HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, or FedRAMP compliance controls in production systems.

  • Developer Ecosystem & Marketplace Building

    Nice to have

    Experience building and scaling developer platforms, partner marketplaces, or integration ecosystems. Understanding of discovery mechanisms, recommendation systems, and partner enablement strategies.

  • Semantic Search & Knowledge Systems

    Nice to have

    Familiarity with semantic search, vector databases, knowledge graphs, or retrieval-augmented generation systems. Understanding of how to make complex enterprise data queryable by AI systems.

Tech stack

Languages

PythonTypeScript/JavaScriptGoSQL

Frameworks

FastAPI / DjangogRPCReact

Databases

PostgreSQLRedisElasticsearch / OpenSearchVector Databases

Tools

KubernetesTerraform / Infrastructure as CodeOAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect LibrariesDatadog / PrometheusGitHub / Git

Other

SOC 2 Type II ComplianceHIPAA ComplianceConnector SDKs & Integration StandardsEnterprise SSO / SCIM ProtocolsData Governance Frameworks

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 300,000 – 405,000

Equity·Stock options

Full posting

Original listing.

Perplexity is continuing to rapidly scale our Enterprise Engineering Organization and seeking Engineering Managers with deep expertise across the Enterprise domain to help lead the next wave of growth.

As an Enterprise Engineering Manager, you will combine technical judgment, product intuition, and people leadership to help large organizations adopt AI at scale. We are hiring across the enterprise control plane, enterprise data plane, and connector marketplace and activation. Depending on your area of focus, you will lead and grow a team in one of these areas, addressing challenges such as:

Enterprise Control Plane: Building the identity, security, and governance foundations that enable large organizations to deploy Perplexity confidently, including SSO, SCIM, role-based access, customer-managed encryption keys (BYOK), admin APIs, and enforceable policies governing access to data, models, and tools. Supporting regulated-industry requirements, including SOC 2, HIPAA, data governance, and residency, with audit logs and analytics that give administrators visibility into how Perplexity is used.

Enterprise Data Plane: Building the connector platform and semantic data layer that give Computer reliable, permission-aware access to enterprise systems and knowledge, including managed authorization, private-system access, and data freshness.

Connector Marketplace and Activation: Building discovery, recommendations, onboarding, and marketplace experiences that help customers find and adopt integrations, while working with partners to expand the connector ecosystem.

Across these areas, you will translate enterprise customer needs into scalable technical solutions across Perplexity’s products.

Responsibilities

  • Set technical direction for your team and guide architecture decisions across the enterprise platform.

  • Build the foundational systems that enable large organizations to deploy Perplexity broadly and confidently.

  • Shape roadmaps with product and design, applying strong technical judgment and product intuition.

  • Set a high bar for reliability, code quality, testing, and maintenance. Lead incident response and ensure platform changes and connector migrations are rolled out safely.

  • Partner with engineering teams across the company to ensure the platforms we build are extensible and easy to adopt.

  • Represent engineering in strategic enterprise customer conversations, partnering with sales and customer success to understand requirements and remove barriers to adoption.

  • Oversee hiring, onboarding, and mentorship for a rapidly growing team. Develop rigorous interview pipelines and work closely with recruiting to source candidates.

  • Work with Perplexity’s co-founders to deliver enterprise engineering priorities.

Qualifications

  • Strong technical judgment and experience building enterprise platforms or products, with an understanding of the reliability, security, and usability requirements of enterprise customers.

  • Domain expertise in at least one of the following areas:

    • Enterprise control plane: identity and access management, SSO/SCIM, role-based access, key management, admin APIs, policy enforcement, audit logging, data governance, or compliance and residency requirements for regulated industries.

    • Enterprise data plane: connector and integration platforms, including authentication, source-system permissions, data synchronization, and reliability at scale; or semantic data layers and knowledge platforms that make enterprise data accessible and useful to AI.

    • Connector marketplace and activation: discovery and recommendation systems, integration onboarding, marketplace product UX, or technology partner ecosystems.

  • Ability to deliver in a fast-moving environment while balancing customer needs, technical quality, and long-term maintainability.

  • Detail-oriented and quality-focused - our customers run critical workflows on Perplexity, and our product needs to stay robust and reliable.

  • Ability to translate enterprise customer needs into clear technical priorities and communicate tradeoffs effectively.

  • Experience building and managing high-performing engineering teams, with a strong management practice grounded in clear feedback, effective 1:1s, career development, and recruiting and retaining high-caliber talent.

  • Ability to lead parallel technical initiatives, align strong technical perspectives, and make clear prioritization and tradeoff decisions.

  • Experience with AI/ML products, enterprise AI adoption, or scaling enterprise platforms at a startup is a plus.

  • 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 4 of those years as an engineering manager.

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