Hybrid Software Engineer – Data Flywheel

at Perplexity

• Job title: Software Engineer – Data Flywheel
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: $210,000 - $385,000 per year
• Degree requirement: No Education Requirement
• Tech skills: AWS, Distributed Systems, Python, Spark, SQL
• Location requirements: Hybrid, London, United Kingdom

About the role

• Software Engineer at Perplexity building data systems for LLM-first search engine. Delivering robust pipelines, ensuring quality insights, and shaping answer accuracy.

Responsibilities

• Build the systems and pipelines that enable Search, Product, and other teams to independently access and utilize reliable eval verdicts without bottlenecks
• Take ownership of the "evals-to-product" loop, autonomously determining the best way to turn raw signals into durable datasets that power decision-making across the company
• Build a robust simulator pipeline capable of replaying user interactions with the product in formats legible to LLMs and VLMs, reflecting product changes as they are shipped
• Maintain data trust by implementing monitoring, lineage, and quality checks, ensuring downstream consumers can rely on the results implicitly
• Operate in a small, high-impact team where your work directly shapes how Perplexity measures and improves Answer Quality

Requirements

• 3+ years of software engineering experience shipping production systems
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL with the ability to write production-grade, maintainable code
• Experience with big data systems including distributed compute and large-scale storage
• Solid fundamentals in data modeling, system design, and debugging distributed systems
• Experience with AWS and lakehouse ecosystems like Databricks or Spark
• Comfortable with agentic coding workflows and using AI-assisted development tools to iterate faster
• Data engineering background including pipelines, orchestration, and warehousing patterns (Preferred)
• Familiarity with LLM/VLM interfaces, tokenization, structured formats, and multimodal payloads (Preferred)
• Experience with evaluation platforms, experimentation systems, or machine learning infrastructure (Preferred)
• Prior work supporting customer-facing products at scale (Preferred)

Benefits

• Full-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.
• Full-time employees outside the U.S. enjoy a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region of residence.