Member of Technical Staff (Search Crawler Analyst)

Maven Ventures; Berlin; On-site; EUR 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Maven Ventures is seeking a data-focused engineer to improve our crawling and indexing systems. You will design metrics, build data pipelines, and contribute to search quality enhancements.

You will work at the intersection of data analysis and engineering, implementing experiments, training small models, and creating datasets for model evaluation. Experience with production-grade code and metric design is valued.

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

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

ML engineering

Backend coding

Metrics design

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