Full Stack Software Engineer, Perplexity AI
Applied AI
$210-385k
+ Equity
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Open for applications
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$210-385k
+ Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- Hands-on experience building production AI or agentic applications end to end, including tool calling, context engineering, and integration with modern LLM APIs
- Strong backend and systems design skills, with a track record of making practical tradeoffs between cost, latency, reliability, and quality in real-world systems
- Proficiency with modern web or product stacks (e.g., Python plus a frontend framework) and comfort working across the stack from data and infra to UI
- Self-directed and high agency, with 4+ years of industry experience in software or AI engineering and a bias toward shipping impactful product work
What the job involves
- Perplexity is seeking full stack applied AI engineers to revolutionize the way people search and interact with information online by building next generation AI products and frontier models
- In this role, you'll build scalable and innovative E2E solutions which powers Perplexity’s wide span of AI applications, including discovery, research agents, eval platforms, monetization and integration with different 3rd party and Sonar LLMs
- Our tech stack includes Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, React, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, vLLM, and AWS
- Design and deliver scalable, end-to-end AI features that power core user experiences such as discovery, deep research, and monetization across Perplexity’s products
- Build and evolve full stack systems that integrate multiple third-party and in-house Sonar models, ensuring seamless orchestration, robustness, and observability in production
- Develop and maintain evaluation and experimentation platforms to measure answer quality, model performance, and product impact, supporting both online and offline workflows
- Collaborate closely with research, product, design, and infra teams to translate frontier model capabilities into shipped user-facing features and internal tools
- Continuously improve performance, reliability, and cost efficiency of AI-powered applications through thoughtful system design, instrumentation, and iteration
Application process
- Roles and teams at Perplexity are fluid. By applying to this position, you will be eligible to join teams across Perplexity Engineering
- During the interview process, we look forward to learning more about your unique talents and figuring out where in our organization you’ll grow and thrive the most
- During interviews, we will be excited to see how you think and understand how you make decisions—qualities that would directly influence our AI development—there may be an opportunity for you to showcase your AI skills; however, we ask that you kindly avoid using AI tools throughout the process unless we explicitly indicate otherwise
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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