AI Research/Machine Learning Engineer - Agent Products

Details

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022. The company builds accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making and assistive AI experiences. Perplexity processes hundreds of millions of queries per month and is rapidly expanding its Agent product suite (Answering Agent, Deep Research, the Comet Browser Agent).

This role seeks experienced AI Research / Machine Learning Engineers and Scientists to own Perplexity's Agent Products. Applicants should be well versed in LLM prompting and training, code execution and tool-calling, and advanced retrieval techniques to continually advance agent capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Design production and training systems that enable autonomous LLM-powered agents to perform tasks across web browsing, retrieval, and code execution, and to return high-quality answers with citations.
• Partner with the Core Research & Post-Training Team to refine expansion, reformulation, querying, and summarization of models against Perplexity’s retrieval index.
• Devise distributed multi-turn evaluations (Evals) to hill-climb performance and capture regressions for browser and deep research agents.
• Improve speed and quality of the codebase and engineering processes to consistently deliver a high-quality product experience.
• Collaborate with Go-to-Market leaders and external stakeholders to develop integrated product solutions across research verticals (e.g., Travel, Retail).

Requirements

• Proven research experience with large-scale LLMs and deep learning systems.
• Strong post-training skills, including familiarity with supervised and reinforcement learning techniques, reward formulation, and evaluation design.
• Deep understanding of prompting, training techniques, and model architecture tradeoffs when building end-to-end agents.
• Experience with code execution, tool-calling, retrieval-driven systems, web browsing integration, and producing answers with citations.
• Consumer product intuition for agent products and willingness to work across the stack and take ownership of end-product experience.
• Minimum of 5 years working on relevant deep learning research areas.

Compensation & Benefits

• Cash compensation range: $200,000 - $280,000 per year. Final offers depend on experience and expertise.
• Equity may be part of the total compensation package.
• Benefits include comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance and a 401(k) plan.

Locations

• New York City; Palo Alto; San Francisco (United States).