Perplexity Research Fellowship

APPLICATIONS CLOSED The general application portal has closed for 2026. We will reopen applications at some point in 2027. Thank you for your interest in Perplexity careers! Welcome! This is the general application portal for university students and recent graduates who wish to be considered for full-time Member of Technical Staff positions at Perplexity. Our elite new grad cohorts enjoy unparalleled mentorship, top-of-market compensation, and the chance to tackle some of the deepest, thorniest challenges in frontier intelligence . NOTE: if you attend one of our focus schools listed below, please do not apply via this portal as it is infrequently monitored due to high volume. Apply instead via the school-specific application portal below to ensure your application receives priority attention. Focus schools (United States) - application portals Caltech | Columbia | Cornell | CMU | Duke | Georgia Tech Harvard | MIT | Michigan | Northwestern | NYU | Penn Princeton | Purdue | Stanford | UC Berkeley | UChicago UCLA | UIUC | UNC Chapel Hill | UT Austin UWashington | Yale Focus Schools (Canada) - application portals McGill | UBC | UToronto | Waterloo Early Career Talent @ Perplexity ​Perplexity believes that exceptionally talented individuals at any stage can thrive in our high-velocity, high-ownership culture. ​Our early career talent program revolves around: ​ Breadth : New grads at Perplexity work across the stack, from Perplexity's agent harnesses to our AI inference and training systems. Many of our most beloved features and most important systems were shipped by individuals fresh out of school. ​ Depth : New grads are entrusted (and expected) to dive deep into whatever problem domains you work on. Often, your work will require you to become a world expert in some problem space that few others in the world have encountered. ​ Mentorship & Growth : We keep the size of our entering new grad cohorts at well below 10% of our technical team. Each individual enjoys a ri

Perplexity is seeking energetic researchers and engineers to join our Secure Intelligence Institute (SII), Perplexity's flagship research center for advancing security, privacy, and trust in frontier intelligence. SII’s goals are to advance frontier AI security research, translate those advances into concrete improvements in Perplexity's systems, and share knowledge and resources that strengthen the broader AI ecosystem. As a member of SII, you'll conduct original and impactful research on improving the security and privacy of frontier intelligence systems. Your goal will be to conduct research that is not only rigorous in theory, but practical enough to improve the systems people rely on every day. This work will be informed by the realities of operating general-purpose AI systems used by millions of people and thousands of enterprises, and you'll be expected to translate both your own research and advances from the broader community to practical improvements that protect and defend Perplexity's users. Responsibilities Develop threat models for emerging attack surfaces in AI-native products, including browser, search, and autonomous agents. Identify and analyze security and privacy threats across AI systems, infrastructure, and user-facing products. Develop novel defenses, mitigations, and detection mechanisms for security and privacy in AI-native products. Build security evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and datasets to measure the effectiveness of different defense mechanisms. Partner with Perplexity’s Security Engineering team to translate state of the art research into shipped security features and hardened system architectures. Collaborate with top-tier academic and industry researchers in SII's external research network. Publish findings at premier venues and contribute to the broader security research community. Qualifications Hold a PhD (or equivalent research experience) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, with a primary focus o

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 ext

About Perplexity AI In 2026, we launched Computer, the defining product for the new era of agentic AI. We’ve scaled beyond the millions of people using Perplexity every day for research, shopping, investing and curiosity into a new paradigm of using AI to transform knowledge into action. As an engineer at Perplexity, your role will be to build products and systems that define how AI empowers humans to think, decide and act. You’ll ship fast and work between both product and infrastructure advancements in our technology. Why Perplexity is different Craftsmanship . We build high quality, tasteful products targeting both the AI native and AI curious. Ownership . You identify the problem, design the solution and ship it. Entrepreneurship . We think like founders, act with urgency, and hustle to deliver for each other and our users. Scholarship . Work among highly talented peers, pursuing knowledge and truth, upleveling ourselves, our teams, and our products. Partnership . We amplify each others' strengths, break down silos, and give selflessly to help our colleagues deliver excellence. About the Role Perplexity is looking for a deeply technical software engineer to own and evolve our model serving platform, which is responsible for connecting our products and research systems with our inference layers. This mission-critical system gives teams one fast, reliable interface across providers. You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, AI products, and infrastructure. You will make it dramatically easier for teams across Perplexity to adopt new models, run rigorous experiments, and ship dependable products. The ideal candidate combines sound technical judgment forged in production systems with active curiosity around the rapidly changing capabilities and failure modes of frontier models. You will design core abstractions, lead high-conviction technical decisions, and write production Rust and Python for a service that serves hundreds of millions of model reque

Perplexity is seeking energetic engineers to join our highly driven Agents engineering team. The Agents team consists of backend, full-stack, and AI/ML engineers who collaborate to build harnesses and AI systems powering delightful agentic experiences. These experiences include Perplexity Computer (our platform for generalized frontier intelligence), the Comet ecosystem , our Agent API, and more. Our vision is to empower our users with agents that can faithfully actualize their intent, however and wherever expressed, through open-ended interactions with the world. As an engineer on our Agents team, you will bring AI expertise, sharp product intuition, and a tinkerer's mindset to advance the frontier of what agents can accomplish for our millions of devoted users. You will work across applied research and engineering to solve many open problems in AI, including: Designing AI agents to navigate the digital world and perform increasingly valuable units of work for our users; Training action and decision models that determine, based on complex multimodal states, how to accomplish user-specified objectives; Providing consistently excellent experiences across desktop, mobile, headless cloud, and other environments through flexible abstractions and frictionless backgrounding; Developing permission architectures, payload classifiers, and other methods to implement secure-by-design agentic capabilities; Designing optimal data representations and modes of interaction between agents and their environments; and much, much more. Responsibilities Engineer agent harnesses that connect powerful models with the environments and tools required to perform economically valuable work for users. Drive cutting-edge AI capabilities across multiple layers of a rapidly growing product in the AI agents space. Develop and leverage cutting-edge AI models, infrastructure, and browser technologies to advance the capability frontier and scale those capabilities for a rapidly growing userbase. Ensu

We build and run the inference engine behind every Perplexity query and deploy dozens of model architectures at scale with tight latency and cost budgets. Our stack is Rust, Python, CUDA, and CuTe DSL - and we need another engineer to join us. What you will work on Examples of real work the team does: New models support. Support transformer-based retrieval, text-generation, and multimodal models in our inference infrastructure, from weight loading, request scheduling and KV-cache management to support in API Gateway. GPU kernels migration to CuTe DSL. Port our in-house CUDA kernels to NVIDIA's CuTe DSL so they run on GB200 today and are portable to Vera Rubin racks tomorrow. Rust-native serving runtime. Develop our internal Rust-based inference server to solve all Python pains and keep up with rapidly growing traffic. Performance optimisation. Profile and fix bottlenecks from network ingress through continuous batching and GPU kernel interleaving. Reliability and observability. Build dashboards, alerts, and automated remediation so we catch regressions before users do. Respond to and learn from production incidents. Who we're looking for Deep experience with GPU programming and performance work (CUDA, Triton, CUTLASS, or similar). Any other deep systems programming experience is a plus. You understand modern LLM architectures and are able to bring them up reliably in a production environment. You've built and operated production distributed systems under real load - ideally performance-critical ones. Comfortable working across languages and layers: Rust for the serving runtime, Python for model code, CUDA/CuteDSL for kernels. You own problems end-to-end. You can read a research paper on Monday, write a kernel on Wednesday, and debug a production incident on Friday. Self-directed. You do well in fast-moving environments where the path forward isn't laid out for you. Good if you touched any of ML compilers and framework internals: PyTorch internals, torch.compile, cus