Member of Data Staff (Data Scientist)

Details

Perplexity is AI for people who expect more. This role brings that standard to how we understand users, shape the product, and decide what to build next.

The data scientist will turn product questions into clear decisions, working across product, engineering, growth, design, and user research to understand user behavior, define metrics, design experiments, and identify high-leverage opportunities. The data team is AI-native, using AI to accelerate analysis, write and review code, explore hypotheses, document data, generate first drafts, and automate recurring workflows. The role requires strong analytical judgment, including asking the right questions, choosing appropriate metrics, designing effective tests, and determining when findings are strong enough to act on.

Responsibilities

• Develop product insights by analyzing user behavior to inform the product roadmap, accelerate adoption, and identify opportunities to improve the user experience.
• Design and analyze experiments by forming hypotheses, defining success metrics, running A/B tests, interpreting results, and turning findings into product recommendations.
• Define important metrics, including metrics, guardrails, dashboards, and reporting workflows that help teams understand product and company health.
• Partner with engineering, product, growth, design, and user research to answer ambiguous questions and drive decisions.
• Build reusable data assets, including tables, models, and documentation that make analysis faster, more consistent, and easier for humans and AI systems to use.
• Use AI to scale data science by automating recurring analysis, building AI-assisted workflows, improving documentation, and turning one-off investigations into repeatable systems.
• Clearly communicate findings, assumptions, uncertainty, and recommendations to support decision-making.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience as a data scientist or in a closely related role.
• Strong product sense, including an understanding of user behavior, product tradeoffs, and how to connect analysis to decisions.
• Expert SQL skills, including the ability to navigate a complex data warehouse independently, reason about grain and joins, and debug data issues.
• Significant experience designing, running, and analyzing A/B tests.
• An AI-native working style, using LLMs and AI tools to work faster without outsourcing analytical judgment.
• Experience building useful reporting in tools such as Omni, Mode, Hex, Looker, or similar, and turning metrics into better product decisions.
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to structure open-ended questions, execute analysis, and make clear recommendations.
• End-to-end ownership from problem definition through stakeholder adoption.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with dbt, data modeling, or analytics engineering.
• Python experience for analysis, automation, or internal tools.
• Experience with Snowflake, especially performance- and cost-aware querying.
• Experience combining qualitative user research with quantitative product analysis.
• Experience as one of the first data scientists at an early- or growth-stage company.
• Machine learning experience or experience working across multiple product surfaces.

Role Details

• Help define how an AI-native data science team operates at Perplexity.
• Work on engagement, retention, and user success questions for AI products without established benchmarks.
• Use frontier AI tools to make analysis faster, more repeatable, and more useful.
• Have direct impact through high ownership in a small team shaping product and company direction.

Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.