Tech Lead, Perplexity AI
Acceleration
$250-325k
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Be an early applicant
Conversational AI-powered search tool
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$250-325k
21-100 employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- The ideal candidate will possess sound technical judgment forged in the trenches of internet-scale companies, paired with voracious use of today’s most advanced AI tools/models and a capacious imagination to rethink how work gets done in the leading companies of tomorrow
- 6+ years of industry experience, ideally with a substantial portion focused on infrastructure/platform engineering or developer acceleration at companies with millions of users and hundreds or thousands of engineers
- Daily use of AI models/tools, along with strong intuition on their jagged frontiers
- Proficiency with Python and working fluency with Typescript
- Strong understanding of (and empathy for) the work of technical staff across disciplines, along with an enthusiasm to learn about the work of business and operations teams
- Broad working knowledge of the typical stacks used by AI product & applied research companies. (For example: you don’t need to have experience hand-rolling CUDA kernels, but you should know what CUDA is and when/where/why it’s used.)
- An obsession with improving the legibility of (and reducing brittleness in) both software and human-orchestrated processes
- Experience navigating tricky exploration-exploitation tradeoffs, balancing the need to ship today with the need to build capacity for tomorrow
What the job involves
- Perplexity is seeking a singularly creative and energetic engineer to spearhead our Acceleration team as its founding tech lead
- We are revolutionizing the way people navigate the internet and the wider world
- To continue building best-in-class products, we are reimagining how our company and our teams operate
- Provide hands-on technical leadership in a hybrid role that marries facets of AI product development, infrastructure/platform engineering, developer experience, and more
- Identify, prioritize, and execute on the highest-potential opportunities to accelerate Perplexity’s delivery cadence with frontier AI capabilities
- Develop empathy for the nuances of our technical and business teams’ work across disciplines and verticals, toward collaborating with them to harness AI in new ways
- Make our codebases, systems, and knowledge stores legible to AI
- Help the company triangulate toward the optimal point on the quality-velocity Pareto frontier, while shifting that frontier outward with AI tools and agents
- Keep abreast of new AI tools/models and make maximally effective use of them in your own work, setting an example across the company and inspiring others to do the same
- Help the company make high-conviction bets on specific technologies in situations where indecision is a comfortable and tempting default
- Work with engineering leadership, recruiting, and others to ensure we instill an AI-forward culture and select for those who will thrive in such an environment
- Note: this is an extremely technical and hands-on role. Strong vision and thought leadership is necessary but not sufficient for success. You will be expected to build both prototypes and production systems, as well as to reengineer our codebases, infrastructure, processes, and anything else that must evolve to realize this vision
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
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Dec 2024
$500m
LATE VC
May 2024
$250m
LATE VC
Total funding: $915m
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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