Member of Technical Staff (Search Crawler Analyst)

Perplexity; Berlin; On-site; EUR 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking a data analyst/ML engineer to join our Berlin team. You will analyze crawling data, build datasets for model training, and train models to optimize parsing quality and indexing decisions.

You will design metrics from scratch and implement production-grade code, contributing to measurable improvements in our search and answer systems.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience as a data analyst, ML engineer, or in a related role.
• Strong coding skills: produce production-grade code at the level of a mid-level backend engineer.
• Experience designing metrics from scratch.
• Experience training ML models that shipped to production with measurable metric improvements.

Responsibilities

• Find and diagnose quality issues in our crawling pipeline.
• Train small models that optimize particular aspects of the pipeline (e.g. parsing quality).
• Build datasets for model training, including LLM-as-a-judge labeling pipelines.
• Improve page selection algorithms for indexing.
• Design and analyze experiments to validate improvements.

Skills

Data analysis

Backend coding

Metric design

ML model training

Job description

The internet is vast, containing trillions of URLs. Perplexity’s crawling and storage system is complex and has multiple stages (URL discovery, crawling, parsing, indexing). Each stage offers many opportunities for improvement and room for intricate bugs. You’ll work at the intersection of data analysis and engineering — designing metrics, building data pipelines, and improving the quality of our search and answer systems.

Responsibilities

• Find and diagnose quality issues in our crawling pipeline
• Train small models that optimize particular aspects of the pipeline (e.g. parsing quality)
• Build datasets for model training, including LLM-as-a-judge labeling pipelines
• Improve page selection algorithms for indexing
• Design and analyze experiments to validate improvements

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience as a data analyst, ML engineer, or in a related role
• Strong coding skills: you should be able to write production-grade code at the level of a mid-level backend engineer
• Experience designing metrics from scratch
• Experience training ML models that shipped to production with measurable metric improvements

Nice to have

• Direct experience working on web crawling or indexing pipelines