Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Search

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022 and growing rapidly as one of the world’s leading AI platforms. Perplexity has raised over $1B in venture investment from some of the world’s most visionary and successful leaders, including Elad Gill, Daniel Gross, Jeff Bezos, Accel, IVP, NEA, Nvidia, Samsung, and many more. Our objective is to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making for people and assistive AI wherever decisions are being made. Throughout human history, change and innovation have always been driven by curious people. Today, curious people use Perplexity to answer more than 780 million queries every month–a number that’s growing rapidly for one simple reason: everyone can be curious. 

Perplexity is seeking an experienced Senior Machine Learning Engineer to help build the next generation of advanced search technologies, with a focus on retrieval and ranking.

Responsibilities

• Relentlessly push search quality forward—through models, data, tools, or any other leverage available
• Architect and build core components of our search platform and model stack
• Train and evaluate retrieval, ranking and classification models, including LLMs
• Deploy models - from boosting to LLMs - in a scalable and performant way
• Build and optimize RAG pipelines for grounding and answer generation
• Collaborate with Data, AI, Infrastructure and Product teams to ensure fast and high quality delivery

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of search and retrieval systems, including quality evaluation principles and metrics
• Proven track record with large-scale search or recommender systems
• Hands-on experience with transformer-based models for dense retrieval, ranking, and classification in large-scale search systems
• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, Math, Physics, or a related field.
• 8 years of experience in software development and with data structures/algorithms in either (C, C++, Python, Java, Go or Rust).
• 5 years of experience with ML design and ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
• 5 years of experience designing, training, and evaluating machine learning models.
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction.
• Self-driven, with a strong sense of ownership and execution

Our cash compensation range for this role is $160,000 - $250,000.