Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Search - London

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 our search platform and model stack
• Train and evaluate retrieval, ranking and classification models, including LLMs
• Deploy models - from boosting 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
• Hands-on experience with transformer-based models for dense retrieval, ranking, and classification in large-scale search systems
• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, Math, Physics, or a related field.
• 8 years of experience in software development and with data structures/algorithms in either (C, C++, Python, Java, Go or Rust).
• 5 years of experience with ML design and ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
• 5 years of experience designing, training, and evaluating machine learning models.
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction.
• Self-driven, with a strong sense of ownership and execution

Our cash compensation range for this role is $160,000 - $250,000.

At Perplexity, we've experienced tremendous growth and adoption since publicly launching the world's first fully functional conversational answer engine in 2022. We've grown from answering 2.5 million questions per day at the start of 2024 to around 20 million daily queries in December 2024. We also offer Perplexity Enterprise Pro, which counts leading companies like Nvidia, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Bridgewater, and Zoom as customers.

To support our rapid expansion, we've raised significant funding from some of the most respected technology investors. Our investor base includes IVP, NEA, Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Naval Ravikant, Tobi Lutke, and many other visionary individuals. In 2024, our employee base grew nearly 300%, and we're just getting started.

Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including, experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.   Equity: In addition to the base salary, equity is part of the total compensation package.