Member of Technical Staff, Perplexity
Machine Learning Engineer, Ranking Quality, Search
3 days a week in office
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Posted today
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Posted today
3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- We are looking for a strong ranking generalist who can own ambiguous problems end to end and brings exceptional depth in either neural ranking or production ranking systems
- Deep understanding of search or recommender systems and their evaluation
- Proven ownership of a large-scale production ranking system or a substantial class of quality problems
- Strong machine-learning and software-engineering skills across data, models, serving, and monitoring
- Ability to drive ambiguous, cross-team problems without continuous task decomposition
- Exceptional depth in either modern neural ranking methods or low-latency ranking systems and runtime
- Minimum 5 years of relevant industry experience
What the job involves
- Perplexity is seeking an experienced Machine Learning Engineer to improve search quality across the middle and later stages of ranking
- Relentlessly push search quality forward through models, data, evaluation, infrastructure, or any other leverage available
- Own ranking-quality problems end to end: define the evaluation, identify the bottleneck, build the solution, and ship it safely
- Train and evaluate retrieval, ranking, and classification models, including neural and LLM-based approaches where appropriate
- Build and operate ranking infrastructure, including feature computation, low-latency inference, multi-stage cascades, deployment, and monitoring
- Make sound trade-offs across quality, latency, reliability, cost, and engineering complexity
- Collaborate across Data, AI, Infrastructure, and Product while retaining ownership of the final quality outcome
Salary benchmarks
Our take
As AI continues to drive changes in both business operations and day-to-day lives, Perplexity 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 has allowed Perplexity 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: $1.8bn
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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