Member of Technical Staff (TPM, Inference)

San Franciscofull timeOn Site

Apply on Employer Site

senior

$170k–$265k

H1B: yes

Perplexity Technical Program Manager at Perplexity driving the core inference platform forward by coordinating model providers, engineering, and product teams. Execute roadmap and manage operating model for inference stack releases.

Responsibilities

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

Qualification

Experience with data and metricsThrives in a small

Required

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