Member of Technical Staff (Machine Learning Research Engineer)
Perplexity · Berlin, Germany · Search
About this role
Perplexity is hiring a staff-level Staff Engineer in the software engineering function based in Berlin, Germany. The posting calls out experience with PyTorch, LLMs, RAG, Deep Learning.
- Role
- Staff Engineer
- Function
- software engineering
- Level
- staff
- Track
- Tech leadership
- Employment
- Full-time
- Location
- Berlin, Germany
- Department
- Search
- Posted
- Apr 3, 2026
More roles at Perplexity
Job description
from Perplexity careersPerplexity is seeking an experienced Machine Learning Research 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)
This is an excerpt. Read the full job description on Perplexity careers →