Engineering Manager - Commerce

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