Security Engineer, Perplexity AI
AI Security
$250-350k
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Be an early applicant
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$250-350k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- Hands-on coding and prompting experience
- Bachelor of Science or Master of Science in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience
- Be a technical and process subject matter expert regarding AI security services and attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures
- Good understanding of LLMs, AI architecture patterns, machine learning models, and related technologies such as MCP
- Understanding of application security principles and secure coding practices
- Experience developing and implementing security procedures and policies
- Strong problem-solving, project management, leadership, and communication skills
- Self-motivated with a willingness to take ownership of tasks
- 4+ years of industry experience
What the job involves
- Perplexity is seeking a highly skilled, experienced, and hands-on AI Security Engineer to join our security team, driving the protection of next-generation AI systems against adversarial threats
- In this role, you’ll design and implement robust mechanisms to secure self-hosted models, LLM APIs, agents, MCPs, and the core AI stack
- You'll empower developers with tools and guidance, as well as technical contributions, enabling innovation while ensuring AI security is strong by default
- Our tech stack includes Python, NextJS, TypeScript, Docker, AWS, Kubernetes, and PostgreSQL
- Define, build, and refine mechanisms to secure AI systems (including self-hosted models, LLM APIs, agents, MCPs, and other core components of the AI stack) against adversarial behavior of all kinds
- Understand technically complex AI systems, identify potential weaknesses in their architecture, and implement improvements
- At least 50% of time performing hands-on remediation. Also working closely with peer engineers to drive remediations
- Plan and carry out threat modeling activities and realistic threat simulations across our offerings
- Conduct cybersecurity evaluations and lead AI security assessments in a cross-functional environment
- Develop initiatives that improve our capabilities to effectively evaluate AI systems and enhance the organization's prevention, detection, response, and threat hunting capabilities
- Provide guidance and education to developers to help deter and prevent threats
Our take
As AI 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 22M monthly visits, Perplexity's "ask anything" method of search is clearly a popular one. And 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 9 rounds)
Sep 2025
$200m
LATE VC
Jul 2025
$100m
LATE VC
Total funding: $1.7bn
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Aravind Srinivas
(Co-Founder, President & 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)Prior to co-founding Perplexity in 2022, Denis was an AI Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research, a Staff ML Engineer at Quora, and a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft.
Johnny Ho
(Co-Founder & CSO)Previously a Quantitative Trader at Tower Research Capital, and Engineer at Quora.
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