Search Machine Learning Research Engineer

Perplexity is seeking an experienced Senior Machine Learning Engineer to help build the next generation of advanced search technologies, with a focus on retrieval and ranking.

Responsibilities

• Relentlessly push search quality forward — through models, data, tools, or any other leverage available

• Architect and build core components of the search platform and model stack

• Design, train, and optimize large-scale deep learning models using frameworks like PyTorch, leveraging distributed training (e.g., PyTorch Distributed, DeepSpeed, FSDP) and hardware acceleration, with a focus on retrieval and ranking models

• Conduct advanced research in representation learning, including contrastive learning, multilingual, and multimodal modeling for search and retrieval

• Deploy models — from boosting algorithms to LLMs — in a scalable and performant way

• Build and optimize RAG pipelines for grounding and answer generation

• Collaborate with Data, AI, Infrastructure, and Product teams to ensure fast and high-quality delivery

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of search and retrieval systems, including quality evaluation principles and metrics

• Proven track record with large-scale search or recommender systems

• Strong proficiency with PyTorch, including experience in distributed training techniques and performance optimization for large models

• Expertise in representation learning, including contrastive learning and embedding space alignment for multilingual and multimodal applications

• Strong publication record in AI/ML conferences or workshops (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, CVPR, SIGIR)

• Self-driven, with a strong sense of ownership and execution

• Minimum of 3 years (preferably 5+) working on search, recommender systems, or closely related research areas