Software Engineer - Data Flywheel

at Perplexity AI

📍 Berlin, Germany
📍 London, United Kingdom
📍 Belgrade, Serbia
📍 San Francisco, United States

USD 210,000-385,000 per year

MIDDLE

✅ Hybrid

Used Tools & Technologies

Not specified

Required Skills & Competences
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.

Python @ 6 SQL @ 6 Spark @ 3 Distributed Systems @ 3 Machine Learning @ 3 AWS @ 3 Data Engineering @ 3 Debugging @ 3 Experimentation @ 3 Databricks @ 3 LLM @ 3 AI @ 3 Data Modeling @ 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, and specialized datasets, combined with both frontier and in-house models, create the best possible experience for users. As the product evolves, evaluations must remain fast, accurate, and actionable. In this role, you will build the data flywheel that serves teams across Perplexity.

Responsibilities

Build the systems and pipelines that enable Search, Product, and other teams to independently access and utilize reliable eval verdicts without bottlenecks.
Take ownership of the "evals-to-product" loop, autonomously determining the best way to turn raw signals into durable datasets that power decision-making across the company.
Build a robust simulator pipeline capable of replaying user interactions with the product in formats legible to LLMs and VLMs, reflecting product changes as they are shipped.
Maintain data trust by implementing monitoring, lineage, and quality checks, ensuring downstream consumers can rely on the results implicitly.
Operate in a small, high-impact team where your 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 compute and large-scale storage.
Solid fundamentals in data modeling, system design, and debugging distributed systems.
Experience with AWS and lakehouse ecosystems like Databricks or Spark.
Comfortable with agentic coding workflows and using AI-assisted development tools to iterate faster.

Preferred Qualifications

Data engineering background 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.
Prior work supporting customer-facing products at scale.

Benefits

U.S. Benefits: Full-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.
International Benefits: Full-time employees outside the U.S. enjoy a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region of residence.
Note: USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions. International salaries are set based on the local market. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.