Engineering Site Lead

The role

The Site Lead will establish and scale the London office and build technical teams. This person will manage infrastructure or AI infrastructure teams and drive technical excellence in infrastructure and AI systems.

What you will do

• Establish and lead the London office and set cultural foundation
• Build a collaborative engineering culture
• Serve as the primary point of contact for London-based activities
• Partner with People, Finance, and Operations for site operations
• Drive local community engagement and brand presence
• Directly manage and mentor one or more infrastructure or AI infrastructure teams
• Set technical direction and strategy for London-based infrastructure
• Drive architectural decisions and technical excellence
• Ensure robust systems for deployment, monitoring, scalability, and reliability
• Build and scale infrastructure and AI infrastructure teams through strategic hiring

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering
• 5+ years in infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, or AI infrastructure roles
• 3+ years of people management experience, including building and scaling teams
• Proven track record of establishing or significantly growing an engineering site or office
• Deep technical expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and infrastructure automation
• Experience with infrastructure supporting large-scale AI/ML systems, including GPU infrastructure and orchestration, ML training and inference pipelines, and model serving and deployment at scale
• Strong understanding of modern infrastructure technologies: Kubernetes, Terraform, container orchestration, CI/CD systems
• Demonstrated ability to set technical vision and drive execution across multiple teams
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
• Experience working in fast-paced, high-growth technology companies
• Passion for building inclusive, diverse, and high-performing teams

Nice to have

• Experience at companies focused on AI/ML, search, or large-scale consumer applications
• Previous experience as a site lead, office lead, or similar multi-team leadership role
• Background in building infrastructure for LLM training or inference
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or AI infrastructure projects
• Experience scaling teams from 0 to 20+ engineers
• Active involvement in the London or European tech community
• MBA or advanced technical degree

Benefits

• Competitive compensation including equity
• Comprehensive benefits package
• Flexible work environment

About the company

Perplexity is revolutionizing how people discover and interact with information through AI-powered search and knowledge tools. The company is establishing a strategic presence in London to drive innovation and growth across Europe.