AI Machine Learning Engineer, Perplexity AI

Query Understanding

$200-280k

+ Equity

Mid and Senior level

New York

San Francisco Bay Area

In office M-W-F

3 days a week in office

Conversational AI-powered search tool

Open for applications

Conversational AI-powered search tool

21-100 employees

B2CArtificial IntelligenceDeep TechMachine Learning

Open for applications

$200-280k

+ Equity

Mid and Senior level

New York

San Francisco Bay Area

In office M-W-F

3 days a week in office

21-100 employees

B2CArtificial IntelligenceDeep TechMachine Learning

Company mission

To advance the way people discover and share information.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

Strong programming skills with the ability to work across the stack in a typical recommendation system or LLM stack
Experience in training DNN and Transformer architecture models
Self-motivated with a willingness to take ownership of tasks
A passion for shipping quality products
4+ years of industry experience in related fields, including search, information retrieval, recommendation system, applied machine learning, and NLP

What the job involves

Perplexity is seeking experienced Applied AI & ML Engineers to build and improve the query understanding systems that power our next-generation information discovery experience
In this role, you'll focus on understanding user intent deeply and accurately, which is foundational to providing relevant, high-quality, and context-aware responses
Architect and develop core machine learning models for query understanding, including intent classification, query rewriting, agentic task decomposition, and function calling
Leverage and fine-tune LLMs to capture nuanced user intent and contextual signals from user queries and behaviors
Deliver end-to-end ML solutions and own the full stack to optimize query understanding
Partner with Product manager and collaborate with other engineers to ensure fast and high quality deliverable to end users

Our take

As artificial intelligence continues to drive changes in both business operations and day-to-day lives, Perplexity AI delivers an intelligent search engine powered by conversational AI, to improve search outcomes and "unlock the power of knowledge" for all.

Reaching impressive heights of 10 million monthly visits, Perplexity's "ask anything" method of search is clearly a popular one. What sets it apart from other search engines is in its answers, which are concise and fully cited, responding to the user query rather than simply providing a place in which they can scroll to find it themselves.

The company has raised substantial funding, with contributions from former execs at companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Quora, demonstrating the interest that it has drummed up in the space. Having doubled its annual recurring revenue between 2023 and 24, this investment will allow Perplexity AI to continue building out its product, and accelerate growth into the future.

Kirsty

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

Top investors

Glassdoor (4.5)

Trustpilot (1.7)

Company

Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)

Jul 2025

$100m

LATE VC

May 2025

$500m

LATE VC

Total funding: $1.5bn

Company benefits

Equity
Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents
401(k)
Generous home-office stipend

Company HQ

Financial District, San Francisco, CA

Leadership

Aravind Srinivas

(Co-Founder & CEO)

Former Research Scientist at OpenAI, who has interned in Research at Google and Deep Mind. Obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Denis Yarats

(Co-Founder & CTO)

PhD Student in AI at NYU. Former AI Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research, and Staff ML Engineer at Quora.

Johnny Ho

(Co-Founder & CSO)

Previously a Quantitative Trader at Tower Research Capital, and Engineer at Quora.

Andy Konwinski

(Co-Founder)

Co-Founder and Advisor at Databricks. Co-Founder and General Partner at CS Graduate Ventures, and Instructor at the University of California, Berkeley.

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