Software Engineer, Perplexity AI
AI Foundation
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Be an early applicant
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- Strong programming and data engineering skills, with proficiency in open source & distributed framework(AWS, Spark, Flink, Iceberg, DynamoDB)
- Familiarity with cloud-based data services (e.g., AWS, RDS, DynamoDB), containerized infrastructure (e.g., EKS, Docker), and data streaming (Flink, Spark streaming, CDC)
- Strong quantitative and engineering skills with experience in estimating performance at high scale
- Experience supporting various ML/AI engineering teams to build scalable frameworks to accelerate R&D for frontier models and AI products
- Experience iterating on improving LLM responses and set up proper evaluation framework or Judges to analysis performance holistically
- Self-motivated with a strong sense of ownership of systems and designs
- 5+ years of industry experience in distributed systems or AI infrastructure
What the job involves
- Perplexity is seeking an experienced Software Engineer focusing on building the next-gen AI Foundation & Platform to help revolutionize the way people search and interact online
- In this role, you'll help build Perplexity’s end-to-end AI data, evaluation and personalization infrastructure and flywheel which powers almost all agent products
- Tech Stack: Spark | AWS Data Stack (S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Docker, EKS, Kinesis) | Pytorch | DynamoDB | Databricks | Snowflake | LLM APIs
- Perplexity is rapidly scaling both in number of use cases and number of users
- Perplexity’s data stack powers scalable, personalized and fast answers for millions of people worldwide
- Collaborate closely with AI Product, Applied ML, Post-Training, and Data Science teams to design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines and data lakes
- Develop high-performance infrastructure that powers personalization features including memory, discover, and agentic products
- Create a scalable, multi-modal evaluation platform for all Perplexity AI products, including personalization, pro search, labs, deep research, and Comet
- Design tools and abstractions on foundational infrastructure to enhance personalization, analytics, recommendations, AI products, and post-training capabilities
- Holistically improve engineering foundation to support rapid growth of Perplexity products and international user base
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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