Member of Data Staff (Analytics Engineer)

Details

Perplexity is building an AI-native data organization. This role will establish the systems that make data reliable, understandable, secure, privacy-aware, and usable by humans and AI systems. The position operates at the intersection of analytics engineering, data engineering, data governance, and internal product development.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain high-quality data models, marts, and pipelines.
• Help own warehouse architecture, environments, permissions, performance, cost management, data lifecycle, and operational hygiene.
• Build documentation, semantic context, metadata, lineage, and retrieval patterns that enable AI systems to understand and query company data correctly.
• Define and promote dbt patterns, dimensional modeling practices, naming conventions, tests, and review processes.
• Establish standards for data access, ownership, lineage, documentation, retention, quality, and sensitive data handling.
• Partner with engineering, security, legal, and finance to ensure data access, sharing, and AI-enabled workflows are appropriately controlled.
• Build AI-assisted data quality workflows that detect issues, explain root causes, suggest fixes, generate tests, and reduce manual firefighting.
• Automate repetitive workflows, improve tooling, streamline development, and help data scientists and stakeholders answer questions.
• Partner with data scientists, engineering, product, finance, and go-to-market teams to translate analytical needs into durable data systems.
• Evaluate build-versus-buy tradeoffs, manage vendor relationships when needed, and select scalable tools.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience as an analytics engineer, data engineer, data scientist, or in a closely related role.
• Deep SQL expertise, including correctness, performance, joins, grain, and edge cases in complex warehouse queries.
• Strong hands-on production experience with dbt or a similar transformation framework.
• Understanding of dimensional modeling, data contracts, testing, and evolving analytical schemas.
• Experience building, maintaining, debugging, and improving production data pipelines.
• Experience with warehouse administration, access patterns, permissions, performance tuning, cost management, or operational ownership.
• Understanding of data ownership, access controls, privacy, retention, lineage, auditability, and data-access risks.
• An AI-native working style, including use of AI for development, documentation, quality assurance, exploration, and workflow automation.
• Ability to translate ambiguous analytical requirements into trusted models, metrics, and reusable data assets.
• Ability to take projects from ambiguous problem to production-quality system with minimal oversight.
• Strong judgment regarding reliability, governance, security, cost, and long-term maintainability.

Bonus Qualifications

• Snowflake administration, optimization, cost management, or warehouse performance tuning.
• Experience with RBAC, PII handling, data classification, retention policies, audit workflows, or privacy and security reviews.
• Experience with Databricks or other modern data infrastructure.
• Experience building semantic layers, metrics layers, metadata systems, or data catalogs.
• Python experience for data tooling, automation, orchestration, or quality checks.
• Experience as an early analytics engineer or data engineer at a high-growth startup.

Role Highlights

• Own the data foundation that determines how quickly and confidently the company can use data.
• Build data infrastructure that is understandable by both AI agents and analysts.
• Create high-leverage models, pipelines, and tools for data scientists and stakeholders.
• Work on a small team with broad scope to define standards, choose tools, and ship company-wide systems.

Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees receive benefits including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more. International employees receive benefits tailored to their region of residence.