Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Applied AI)

The role

You will design, build, and iterate on agents powering Perplexity Computer. You will develop frontier context layer applications and own the entire model lifecycle from research to production.

What you will do

• Apply state-of-the-art ML and LLM techniques to personalization, contextual recommendations, and monetization applications
• Build frontier agent capabilities on top of Perplexity Computer
• Build auto research harness for offline and online techniques
• Design experiments and metrics for quality and impact
• Own the entire model lifecycle from research to production
• Perform data analysis, modeling, evaluation, and offline/online A/B testing
• Build autonomous harness for agent squad to explore problem spaces
• Collaborate cross-functionally with engineers, PMs, data scientists, and designers
• Evaluate and incorporate emerging research and algorithms into the product lifecycle

Required qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills (Python, production-quality codebases, collaborative development)
• Experience using agentic coding tools for large scale parallel developments
• In-depth experience with the full AI lifecycle: data analysis, rigorous evaluation, and ongoing monitoring/improvement
• Proven collaborator and communicator
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)

Nice to have

• 5+ years experience building and shipping robust AI products for large-scale, user-facing or data-driven products
• Curious, driven by end-user/product impact, and passionate about advancing the state of applied ML and AI
• Experience with LLM context engineering or harness engineering
• Experience in mid-training or post-training frontier open source models
• Experience in large scale user-centric and content-centric personalization challenges (user modeling, retrieval, content ranking, etc)

About the company

Perplexity is looking for an Applied AI Engineer to design, build, and iterate on cutting-edge agents powering our core experience in Perplexity Computer.