Member of Technical Staff (TPM, Inference)

About the role

Perplexity is looking for a technical program manager to be the connective tissue between our model providers, engineering, and product teams, driving our core inference platform forward.

Perplexity runs one of the highest-throughput inference stacks in the industry, serving Ask, Computer, and API traffic across a large and constantly shifting portfolio of first-party and third-party models.

This role sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and finance: you'll orchestrate across model providers and internal teams to keep new models and capacity moving smoothly into production, while executing the roadmap for the inference platform itself.

The ideal candidate has strong technical judgment, thrives coordinating across teams and external partners with competing timelines, and is energized by building the operating model for a function that doesn't have much precedent yet.

What You'll Do

• Execute the roadmap for the inference platform request handling, rate limits and quotas, usage controls, and the reliability and observability surface engineering and product teams depend on
• Be the connective tissue between model providers and Perplexity's engineering and product teams coordinating onboarding, launch readiness, and rollout for new models and capacity
• Drive latency, throughput, uptime, and cost-efficiency as core execution metrics, surfacing tradeoffs between them rather than letting them become side effects
• Run the operating model for model-release and optimization programs, including day-zero launches, across performance engineering, infrastructure, and product teams
• Lead cross-functional delivery for inference-stack changes, from planning through launch and post-launch validation
• Build the mechanisms that make releases predictable rituals, dashboards, launch checklists so inference releases stay low-risk at Perplexity's scale
• Partner with GPU capacity and compute teams to reconcile execution decisions against cost, capacity, and vendor constraints

Qualifications

• Strong experience with technical program management or product management in infrastructure, distributed systems, or ML/model-serving products
• Direct experience with production LLM or ML inference understanding what makes serving fast, reliable, and cheap rather than just what a roadmap slide says about it
• Comfort orchestrating across external partners and internal engineering teams with competing priorities and timelines
• Experience with data and metrics, and the judgment to surface difficult tradeoffs between latency, throughput, uptime, and cost
• Thrives in a small, agile team; has initiative and desire for ownership without much precedent to lean on
• 6+ years of combined technical program management or product management experience