---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff (ML Engineer, Recommendations & User Modeling) at Perplexity'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-ml-engineer-recommendations-user-modeling-perplexity-w7d9rtv1h2qh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-08'
---

# Member of Technical Staff (ML Engineer, Recommendations & User Modeling) at Perplexity

- **Company:** [Perplexity](https://feeny.ai/companies/perplexity)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $220k–$405k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-06-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Perplexity/affd3040-91e4-4e0c-bd2f-4b022c613f91

## Job description

Perplexity is seeking experienced ML engineers to design, build, and optimize the recommendation systems that power core experiences on Perplexity. Perplexity builds AI for those who expect more. Our products are designed to help people find answers, make their most consequential decisions, and complete increasingly ambitious work. Across these use cases, the Perplexity experience must feel deeply personal. Great recommendations and user understanding are central to delighting and delivering for each user. To do this, we are reimagining recommendation systems for the LLM era. Our goal is to combine the intelligence of frontier LLMs, the personalization context that comes from real product usage, and the continual learning capabilities of modern recommendation systems. We build systems that draw on past context and connected data sources to deeply understand each user's needs and recommend the actions that help them get the most out of Perplexity.

## Why Perplexity is Different

- Craftsmanship. We build high quality, tasteful products targeting both AI native and AI curious users.
- Ownership. You identify the problem, design the solution and ship it.
- Entrepreneurship. We think like founders, act with urgency, and hustle to deliver for each other and our users.
- Scholarship. Work among highly talented peers, pursuing knowledge and truth, upleveling ourselves, our teams, and our products.
- Partnership. We amplify each others’ strengths, break down silos, and give selflessly to help our colleagues deliver excellence.

## What you'll do

- Own the personalization and ranking behind key product surfaces to make Perplexity more useful and drive impact on core user and business metrics.
- Build user modeling that captures intent, preference, and propensity, and powers more relevant, more personalized experiences.
- Design the decision layer that balances competing objectives to produce the best overall experience for the user.
- Build the data and evaluation foundations that let these systems learn and improve with usage.
- Help shape the technical direction of ranking, recommendations, and personalization at Perplexity.

## What we're looking for

- Deep, hands-on experience building production recommendation, ranking, or personalization systems at scale.
- Strong ML fundamentals, covering areas such as engagement modeling, model calibration, offline and online metrics, and online experimentation.
- Experience integrating LLMs into ranking, retrieval, or personalization pipelines.
- Taste and judgment for how personalization should work in an LLM-native product, and curiosity about reimagining it from first principles.
- For tech leadership roles, we will also look for prior experience setting technical direction for recommendation/ranking projects.

## Nice to have

- Experience with large-scale ranking and training infrastructure (multi-stage retrieval and ranking, feature stores, real-time serving).
- Background in user understanding, feed ranking, notifications, growth, or lifecycle modeling.

## Our Mission

Perplexity’s mission is to power curiosity. Curious people are the people who drive change in the world. Driving change is a continuous cycle of learning, building, and integrating. Learn: curious people constantly learn new things by asking more. They question the status quo in their own expertise and they constantly learn outside of it. Research is essential to them and never ending. Build: curious people make and create things, to show the world their new answers to problems no one else ever questioned. They take action on what they’ve learned. Makers need tools to create their products, their companies, their reality. Integrate: they must interact with the world as it is to drive change and adoption. True leaders do not simply build something and hope. They must have armies of agents and workers who can constantly work in millions of small ways. Repeat. For curious people this is a cycle that never ends.

## About Perplexity

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Perplexity builds an AI-powered answer engine that delivers accurate, real-time answers to any question, serving curious minds and professionals who demand precision and speed.
- **Entity Type**: Private (total funding $1.7B across 16 rounds)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, Andy Konwinski

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI-powered search and knowledge retrieval, Software Development
- **Target customers**: B2C (general users), B2B (enterprise API customers), and power users seeking reliable information
- **Mission**: “AI for people who expect more – more accuracy, more agency, more signal, less noise.”

## Products & Services
- **Perplexity AI (Free Tier)**: Real-time conversational search engine that synthesizes web results with citations, accessible via web and mobile app. *Type*: SaaS
- **Perplexity Pro**: Subscription offering enhanced features such as advanced AI models, multimodal search, and increased usage limits. *Type*: SaaS (subscription)
- **Perplexity API Platform**: Enables developers to integrate Perplexity’s search and reasoning capabilities into their own applications. *Type*: API
- **Perplexity Browser Extension**: Brings AI-powered search directly into the browser for quick answers without leaving the page. *Type*: Browser extension

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available in provided sources (prior reports indicate ~$9B valuation as of 2024, but not confirmed in this data set)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $1.7B (16 rounds); annual revenue ~$50M (LinkedIn estimate)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not explicitly listed in provided search results; widely known investors include IVP, NEA, Jeff Bezos, and others (not sourced here)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 11.3% YoY to 1,152 employees; operates in 54 countries; LinkedIn followers grew 131.8% yearly to >1.6M; active hiring across 48+ open roles including AI Research, Engineering, and Go-to-Market teams

## Competitive Advantages
- **Real-time, cited answers**: Unlike traditional chatbots, Perplexity grounds answers in live web results with transparent sources, building trust and accuracy.
- **Multimodal and agentic capabilities**: Continuously pushes frontier research (e.g., query-aware context compression, agents for knowledge work) that differentiates from generic LLM interfaces.
- **Vertical integration from research to product**: In-house AI research team tackles open problems unique to Perplexity’s scale, enabling fast iteration on novel methods.
- **Strong brand and user base**: Rapid consumer adoption with millions of monthly active users and high engagement.

## Strategic Focus
- **Pushing the frontier of search**: Evolving from retrieval services to code generation, agents, and full autonomy in knowledge work.
- **Expanding enterprise and API revenue**: Growing B2B footprint with API platform and enterprise solutions.
- **Global hiring and office expansion**: Offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, Austin, Washington D.C., London, Berlin, and Belgrade, with “4 days in office” hybrid model.
- **Investing in AI research**: Dedicated research division (Perplexity Research) exploring reasoning, agents, and systems to redefine how people navigate the internet.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Environment**: “Thoughtful support” culture with emphasis on craftsmanship, ownership, entrepreneurship, scholarship, and partnership. Hybrid schedule (4 days in-office) based on location.
- **Perks**: Daily catered meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner in office), office snacks, ride home program, commuter benefits, home office reimbursement, fitness classes, gym memberships.
- **Compensation & Benefits**: Competitive salary and equity packages; retirement plans with company match; flexible PTO; holiday shutdown between Christmas and New Year; 12 weeks paid bonding leave; comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
- **Relocation & Visa Support**: Relocation assistance and visa/green card sponsorship for eligible roles. Partners with immigration firm to support the process.
- **Engineering Excellence**: “Technical assessment for relevant roles”; values hands-on contribution, broad skill sets, and merit-based evaluation. Frequent Tech Talks and exposure to greenfield AI research problems.

## Sources
1. [perplexity.ai/hub/careers](https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/careers)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity)
3. [perplexity.ai](https://www.perplexity.ai/)
4. [linkedin.com/company/perplexity-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/perplexity-ai)
5. [research.perplexity.ai](https://research.perplexity.ai/)

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- [Counsel, Product](https://feeny.ai/job/counsel-product-perplexity-san-francisco-q83swsxegxar) — San Francisco, CA
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