Member of Technical Staff (Search Crawler Analyst) at Perplexity (Belgrade, Serbia)
Perplexity· Belgrade, Serbia·
Role details
Perplexity at a glance
AI-powered answer engine that returns real-time, cited answers, now expanding into an agentic browser and on-device agents.
Perplexity runs an AI answer engine that searches the live web and returns direct, cited answers instead of a page of links. It has extended that core into an AI browser (Comet), an on-device agent (Computer), a developer API, and vertical tools like patent search.
$1.7B raised · latest: Series E extension · $200M · 2025 (reported $20B valuation) · backed by Accel, IVP, NEA, SoftBank Vision Fund 2
Job description
The internet is vast, containing trillions of URLs. Perplexity’s crawling and storage system is complex and has multiple stages (URL discovery, crawling, parsing, indexing). Each stage offers many opportunities for improvement and room for intricate bugs. You’ll work at the intersection of data analysis and engineering — designing metrics, building data pipelines, and improving the quality of our search and answer systems.
Responsibilities
- Find and diagnose quality issues in our crawling pipeline
- Train small models that optimize particular aspects of the pipeline (e.g. parsing quality)
- Build datasets for model training, including LLM-as-a-judge labeling pipelines
- Improve page selection algorithms for indexing
- Design and analyze experiments to validate improvements
Qualifications
- 4+ years of experience as a data analyst, ML engineer, or in a related role
- Strong coding skills: you should be able to write production-grade code at the level of a mid-level backend engineer
- Experience designing metrics from scratch
- Experience training ML models that shipped to production with measurable metric improvements
Nice to have
- Direct experience working on web crawling or indexing pipelines
Why work at Perplexity
- 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.