AI Researcher (Member of Technical Staff)
Posted Updated
- Perplexity is seeking top-tier AI Research Scientists and Engineers to advance our AI products and capabilities
- We’re building the future of AI-powered search and agent experiences through our Sonar models, Deep Research Agent, Comet Agent, and Search products
- Join us in creating SOTA experiences that handle hundreds of millions of queries and continue to scale rapidly
- Depending on your interests and expertise, you’ll work on one of three specialized teams:
- Core Research Team (Horizontal)
- Focus on generating and improving base models that power all our products. This team works on foundational model capabilities, post-training techniques, building RL infra and infrastructure that benefits the entire organization
- Agent Products Team (Vertical)
- Concentrate on fine-tuning and optimizing models for our Deep Research Agent and Labs/Canvas products. This team bridges research and product, ensuring our agent capabilities deliver exceptional user experiences
- Comet Agent Team (Vertical)
- Dedicated to developing and enhancing our Comet Agent product. This specialized team focuses on the unique requirements and optimizations needed for Comet’s specific use cases
- Responsibilities:
- Post-train SOTA LLMs using the latest supervised and reinforcement learning techniques (SFT/DPO/GRPO)
- Leverage our rich query/answer dataset to scale model performance across Sonar, Deep Research, Comet, and Search products
- Stay current with the latest LLM research, especially in model training, optimization, and personalization techniques
- Implement preference optimization and personalization capabilities to enhance user experience
- Invent in-house improvements and optimizations to enhance SOTA models
- Turn research ideas into algorithms and run experiments to launch new models
- Own full-stack data, training, and evaluation pipelines required for model development
- Build robust and effective training frameworks (on top of Megatron/PyTorch) for post-training LLMs
- Implement necessary infrastructure and components to support cutting-edge model training at scale
- Integrate models seamlessly into our product ecosystem
- Work closely with engineering teams to integrate models into Perplexity’s product suite
- Collaborate across teams to ensure cohesive AI experiences throughout our platform
- Partner with product teams to understand user needs and translate them into model improvements
- Minimum 2-6 years of experience on relevant projects (depending on seniority level)
- Passion for tackling challenging problems
- Proven experience with large-scale LLMs and Deep Learning systems
- Experience with post-training techniques and reinforcement learning
- Strong programming skills in Python/PyTorch; versatility is a plus
- Self-starter with a willingness to take ownership of tasks
- PhD in Machine Learning, AI, Systems, or related areas
- Experience in post-training LLMs with SFT/DPO/GRPO
- C++/CUDA programming skills
- Experience building LLM training frameworks
- Experience with agent systems and multi-step reasoning
- Academic publications and research impact
- Background in personalization and preference learning