Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Data Flywheel)

📍 New York City, United States
📍 San Francisco, United States

USD 200,000-350,000 per year

MIDDLE

✅ Hybrid

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI @ 3 AWS @ 3 Data Engineering @ 3 Data Modeling @ 3 Databricks @ 3 Debugging @ 3 Distributed Systems @ 3 Experimentation @ 3 LLM @ 2 Machine Learning @ 3 Python @ 6 SQL @ 6 Spark @ 3

Details

Perplexity serves tens of millions of users daily with reliable, high-quality answers grounded in an LLM-first search engine and specialized data sources. The Answer Quality team ensures that prompts, tools, search, specialized datasets, frontier models, and in-house models create the best possible user experience. In this role, you will build the data flywheel that serves teams across Perplexity.

Responsibilities

Build systems and pipelines that enable Search, Product, and other teams to independently access and use reliable evaluation verdicts without bottlenecks.
Own the "evals-to-product" loop and determine how to turn raw signals into durable datasets that support decision-making across the company.
Build a robust simulator pipeline capable of replaying user interactions with the product in formats understandable to LLMs and VLMs, while reflecting product changes as they are shipped.
Maintain data trust by implementing monitoring, lineage, and quality checks so downstream consumers can rely on the results.
Work in a small, high-impact team whose work directly shapes how Perplexity measures and improves Answer Quality.

Requirements

3+ years of software engineering experience shipping production systems.
Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, with the ability to write production-grade, maintainable code.
Experience with big data systems, including distributed computing and large-scale storage.
Solid fundamentals in data modeling, system design, and debugging distributed systems.
Experience with AWS and lakehouse ecosystems such as Databricks or Spark.
Comfort with agentic coding workflows and AI-assisted development tools.

Preferred Qualifications

Data engineering experience, including pipelines, orchestration, and warehousing patterns.
Familiarity with LLM/VLM interfaces, tokenization, structured formats, and multimodal payloads.
Experience with evaluation platforms, experimentation systems, or machine learning infrastructure.
Previous experience supporting customer-facing products at scale.

Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees receive benefits including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care accounts. Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive benefits tailored to their region of residence. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set based on the local market. Final offer amounts depend on factors including experience and expertise.