Applied AI Engineer (AI)

Location: San Francisco, New York City, or Palo Alto, United States

Salary: $220,000–$405,000 USD per year, plus equity. Listed salary ranges apply to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set according to the local market.

Company

Perplexity develops AI-powered products and frontier agent capabilities for millions of users worldwide.

What you will do

• Design, build, and iterate on agents powering Perplexity Computer.
• Apply machine learning and large language model techniques to personalization, memory, context summarization, retrieval, ranking, recommendations, and monetization applications.
• Build automated research harnesses for offline and online techniques, experiments, and quality and impact metrics.
• Own the model lifecycle from data analysis and modeling through evaluation, A/B testing, production, monitoring, and iterative improvement.
• Build autonomous harnesses that enable agent squads to explore different problem spaces.
• Collaborate with engineers, product managers, data scientists, and designers to improve the product through AI.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping robust AI products for large-scale, user-facing, or data-driven products.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and experience working with production-quality codebases.
• Experience with the full AI lifecycle, including data analysis, rigorous evaluation, and ongoing monitoring and improvement.
• Experience using agentic coding tools for large-scale parallel development.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills in high-velocity, cross-functional teams.
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with LLM context engineering or harness engineering.
• Experience with mid-training or post-training of frontier open-source models.
• Experience with large-scale user-centric and content-centric personalization, including user modeling, retrieval, and content ranking.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on mission-critical AI systems serving millions of users.
• U.S. full-time employees receive equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care benefits.
• Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive benefits tailored to their region of residence.
• International compensation is determined according to the local market and candidate experience and expertise.