Member of Technical Staff, Perplexity AI
Secure Intelligence Institute
$220-405k
Offers equity
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Be an early applicant
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$220-405k
Offers equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- Hold a PhD (or equivalent research experience) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, with a primary focus on security and/or privacy
- Experience publishing at top security conferences (IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS) demonstrating original, impactful research contributions
- Deep expertise in one or more of: security of agentic systems, systems security, web and applications security, program analysis, and software security
- Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust)
- Ability to operate with high independence, willing to dive in and take ownership, and comfortable in a fast-paced environment where research directly informs product
- Clear and concise communcation, translating complex attack narratives into actionable insights for engineering and leadership
What the job involves
- As a member of SII, you'll conduct original and impactful research on improving the security and privacy of frontier intelligence systems
- Your goal will be to conduct research that is not only rigorous in theory, but practical enough to improve the systems people rely on every day
- This work will be informed by the realities of operating general-purpose AI systems used by millions of people and thousands of enterprises, and you'll be expected to translate both your own research and advances from the broader community to practical improvements that protect and defend Perplexity's users
- Develop threat models for emerging attack surfaces in AI-native products, including browser, search, and autonomous agents
- Identify and analyze security and privacy threats across AI systems, infrastructure, and user-facing products
- Develop novel defenses, mitigations, and detection mechanisms for security and privacy in AI-native products
- Build security evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and datasets to measure the effectiveness of different defense mechanisms
- Partner with Perplexity’s Security Engineering team to translate state of the art research into shipped security features and hardened system architectures
- Collaborate with top-tier academic and industry researchers in SII's external research network
- Publish findings at premier venues and contribute to the broader security research community
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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