Role at a glance
- Salary
- $200K – $330K/yr
- Location
- San Francisco, United States Palo Alto, United States
- Work arrangement
- Hybrid
- Employment
- Full-time
- Experience
- 2 to 10+ years of experience in software engineering or research.
Spotted an issue?
We’ll check it against the original posting.
Role Summary
Software engineers on the Model Behavior team shape how Perplexity’s AI products respond and use tools, skills, and memory. The work focuses on context and prompt engineering across products, features, and use cases.
What You'll Do
- Design, test, and optimize prompts, skills, tools, and memory that shape responses.
- Build self-improvement loops to refine prompts and improve tool, skill, and memory use.
- Experiment with and help release new models.
- Research inconsistencies and failure modes in model outputs across internal and production systems.
- Share prompt design and context engineering practices with engineers across teams.
- Track prompting, context engineering, and alignment techniques from industry and academia.
Generated from the employer's posting. Verify important details before applying.
View full postingQualifications
Required: 2 to 10+ years of experience in software engineering or research; strong software engineering fundamentals and technical understanding of LLM-driven and agentic systems; experience shaping LLM behavior through prompts, tool and skill design, or memory systems; strong written and verbal communication skills, particularly in explaining complex concepts to diverse stakeholders.
Preferred
- Recent experience working on modern LLM-driven products.
- Experience working across teams or with external partners.
- Experience designing evaluations or benchmarks for AI systems.
Original job description
Content provided by the employer
Original job description
Content provided by the employer
About the Role
We're hiring software engineers for the Model Behavior team to help shape how Perplexity’s AI products behave: the style of their responses, and the way they use tools, skills, and memory. The team designs prompt and context engineering strategies to deliver high-quality user experiences across multiple domains and models.
The ideal candidate for this role has a strong software engineering background, and an analytical, experiment-driven approach to solving challenging problems. You’ll work on context and prompt engineering to shape model behavior and style, and to guide how models use tools, skills, and memory across our products.
What you'll do
Context Engineering: Design, test, and optimize the prompts, skills, tools, and memory that shape Perplexity responses across products, features, and use cases. Build self-improvement loops to steer the prompt, improve tool/skill use, and improve the ability to draw on memory.
Model Releases: Help experiment with and release new models.
Research & Analysis: Identify inconsistencies and failure modes in model outputs through well-designed research projects, for both internal and production systems.
Knowledge Sharing: Help engineers across teams build intuition for prompt design and context engineering best practices.
Staying Current: Track the latest prompting, context engineering, and alignment techniques from industry and academia, and bring the best ideas back to the team.
What We're Looking For
Required
2 to 10+ years of experience in software engineering or research.
Strong background in software engineering fundamentals, and a technical understanding of LLM-driven and agentic systems.
Experience shaping LLM behavior through prompts, tool and skill design, or memory systems.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, particularly in explaining complex concepts to diverse stakeholders.
Nice to have
Recent experience working on modern LLM-driven products.
Experience working across teams or with external partners.
Experience designing evaluations or benchmarks for AI systems.
About the company
Perplexity
Startup
Perplexity is an innovative technology company that specializes in developing advanced artificial intelligence solutions aimed at enhancing human-computer interaction. With a focus on natural language processing and machine learning, Perplexity empowers users to access information and insights more intuitively and efficiently. The company is dedicated to creating tools that simplify complex data and foster informed decision-making, thereby transforming the way individuals and organizations engage with knowledge. Through its commitment to excellence and user-centric design, Perplexity is shaping the future of information retrieval and analysis.