Engineering Manager - Commerce
Perplexity
Location
San Francisco, New York City
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
Hybrid
Department
Product
Compensation
- $250K – $325K • Offers Equity
For Full Time, US-based applicants:
Equity: In addition to the base salary, equity may be part of the total compensation package.
Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents. Includes a 401(k) plan.
Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Perplexity is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the team building the foundation for how commerce works in an AI-native world. The Commerce team will own the full commerce stack: payments infrastructure, agentic commerce capabilities, and emerging monetization opportunities as we explore what's possible.
You will lead, grow, and support a team solving critical problems at the intersection of payments and AI, including:
Building and scaling billing infrastructure across consumer subscriptions, enterprise plans, API usage (Sonar), and premium features
Architecting agentic commerce capabilities that enable seamless in-conversation transactions
Designing reliable, compliant financial systems that can scale with Perplexity's rapid growth
Partnering with external partners to bring new commerce integrations to market
Shaping future monetization strategies as we expand beyond existing revenue models
Responsibilities
Lead and grow a team of engineers building payments, billing, and commerce systems
Own the technical roadmap for subscription infrastructure and payment integrations
Drive architecture decisions for agentic commerce—defining how Perplexity facilitates transactions within conversational experiences
Collaborate with product, finance, and external partners to ship new commerce capabilities
Foster a high-performance engineering culture focused on reliability, velocity, and technical excellence
Qualifications
9+ years of software engineering experience
4+ years of engineering management experience including recruiting, growing, and retaining high-caliber talent
5+ years of engineering experience on payments or commerce systems at consumer-scale traffic and reliability
Deep experience with Stripe, PayPal, or similar payment platforms
Strong organizational skills for managing and delivering parallel technical projects; ability to guide senior engineers in making sound tradeoffs and prioritization decisions
Comfort with ambiguity; parts of this roadmap are still being written
Track record of shipping reliable, compliant financial systems
Nice to Have
Experience with building or integrating with 3rd party to support modern payment rails (ACH, open banking, real-time payments) and multi-rail architectures
Experience supporting various monetization strategies including subscriptions, ads, and marketplace
Experience dealing with fraud prevention solutions and systems
Compensation Range: $250K - $325K