Member of Technical Staff (Secure Intelligence Institute)

The role

You will conduct original research to improve the security and privacy of frontier intelligence systems. You will translate research into practical improvements for Perplexity's systems and share knowledge with the AI ecosystem.

What you will do

• Develop threat models for emerging attack surfaces in AI-native products.
• Identify and analyze security and privacy threats across AI systems, infrastructure, and user-facing products.
• Develop novel defenses, mitigations, and detection mechanisms.
• Build security evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and datasets.
• Partner with Perplexity’s Security Engineering team to translate research into shipped security features.
• Collaborate with researchers in SII's external research network.
• Publish findings at premier venues.

Required qualifications

• PhD or equivalent research experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, with a primary focus on security and/or privacy.
• Experience publishing at top security conferences (IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS).
• Deep expertise in one or more of: security of agentic systems, systems security, web and applications security, program analysis, and software security.
• Proficiency in Python.
• Ability to operate with high independence.
• Ability to take ownership.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced environment where research directly informs product.
• Clear and concise communication.

Nice to have

• TypeScript
• Go
• Rust

About the company

Perplexity is seeking researchers and engineers to join its Secure Intelligence Institute (SII), a research center for advancing security, privacy, and trust in frontier intelligence.