Engineering Manager, Security

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. It is a small, senior team that builds its own detections, alert-triage agents, continuous offensive testing and secure-by-default platforms, and is turning them into cybersecurity products for customers. The Engineering Manager leads and grows Security Engineering, including the engineers building those products, sets the technical direction for defending infrastructure, products and the corporate environment, and reports to the head of security.

Key responsibilities

• Lead, hire and grow security engineers across detection and response, cloud and infrastructure security, application and product security, offensive security and identity and corporate security.
• Set technical direction for agent-driven cybersecurity products and own delivery to design partners and enterprise customers.
• Keep the internal security program and the product tightly linked, so daily work becomes shipped product and customer feedback improves defenses.
• Set the roadmap balancing incident load, risk reduction and long-term platform investments.
• Own incident response operations: on-call health, escalation, cross-team coordination and postmortems that lead to real fixes.
• Drive an AI-first security program, automating investigation, response and remediation with agents.
• Partner with engineering and infrastructure leaders to embed security work in their roadmaps, and represent Security Engineering in customer reviews, bug bounty engagements and audits.
• Build the team's operating rhythm: ownership, key metrics (time to detect, time to contain, open risk) and written standards.
• Stay hands-on: review designs and code, run investigations when needed, and keep a working understanding of the defended systems.

Required profile

• 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 incidents, including technical investigation, containment and communication with executives and customers.
• Strong management practice: feedback, 1:1s, career development, and a track record of hiring and retaining senior engineers.
• Experience shipping software products to external customers, ideally security products, and building security programs at a fast-growing company.
• 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).

Required skills

• Modern infrastructure: Kubernetes, cloud-native services, CI/CD
• Able to engage credibly with engineers on design and code
• Ability to make tradeoffs under pressure and explain risk to technical and non-technical audiences