The posting
ABOUT THE ROLE
Perplexity's security team protects products used by millions of people and thousands of enterprises, including AI agents that browse the web, run code, and act in customer systems. The team is small, senior, and builds most of what it uses: our own detections, agents that triage and investigate alerts around the clock, continuous offensive testing, and secure-by-default platforms for the rest of engineering.
We're also turning what we've built into cybersecurity products for customers, so the same team that defends Perplexity builds what we ship.
We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow Security Engineering, including the engineers building our cybersecurity products. You'll own the team's execution and people, set the technical direction for how we defend our infrastructure, products, and corporate environment, and lead the product engineering work that brings those systems to customers. You'll stay close enough to the work to run an incident or review a design yourself. You'll report to Perplexity's head of security and work with engineering, infrastructure, IT, product, legal, and our co-founders.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Lead, hire, and grow a team of security engineers across detection and response, cloud and infrastructure security, application and product security, offensive security, and identity and corporate security.
- Lead the engineers building our cybersecurity products: set technical direction for agent-driven products across application security, offensive testing, cloud security, and detection and response, and own delivery to design partners and enterprise customers.
- Keep the internal security program and the product tightly linked, so what the team runs on Perplexity every day becomes what we ship, and customer feedback improves how we defend ourselves.
- Set the roadmap for Security Engineering, balancing incident load, risk reduction, and long-term platform investments, and make clear prioritization calls.
- Own security incident response operations: on-call health, escalation, cross-team coordination during incidents, and postmortems that lead to real fixes.
- Drive an AI-first security program. Push the team to automate investigation, response, and remediation with agents, and hold that automation to a high bar for accuracy and safety.
- Partner with engineering and infrastructure leaders to get security work into their roadmaps, from threat models and design reviews to least-privilege access and secure-by-default libraries.
- Represent Security Engineering in enterprise customer security reviews, external researcher and bug bounty engagements, and audits.
- Build the team's operating rhythm: clear ownership, metrics that matter (time to detect, time to contain, open risk), and written standards others can follow.
- Stay hands-on: review designs and code, run investigations when needed, and keep a working understanding of the systems the team defends.
QUALIFICATIONS
- 8+ years of engineering experience in security, with at least 3 years managing security or infrastructure engineering teams.
- Deep hands-on background in at least two of: detection and response, cloud security (AWS preferred), application or product security, offensive security, or identity and access management.
- Experience leading incident response for serious security incidents, including technical investigation, containment, and communication with executives and customers.
- Strong management practice: clear feedback, effective 1:1s, career development, and a track record of hiring and retaining strong senior engineers.
- Comfortable with modern infrastructure (Kubernetes, cloud-native services, CI/CD) and able to engage credibly with engineers on design and code.
- Ability to make good tradeoffs under pressure and explain risk clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience shipping software products to external customers, ideally security products, including working with design partners and turning customer feedback into a roadmap.
- Experience building security programs at a fast-growing company, where you built more than you bought.
- Bonus: experience securing AI/ML systems, LLM applications, or autonomous agents, or using AI to scale security operations.
- Bonus: experience supporting enterprise compliance programs (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP) from the engineering side.
