AI-Native Analytics Engineer: Data Foundation Architect

Perplexity AI; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity AI is seeking an analytics engineer or data engineer to build the foundation of an AI-native data organization. You will design core data models, pipelines, semantic layers, and governance practices that power the company’s analytics and AI agents, while ensuring privacy and security.

You will own warehouse architecture, performance, and scalable data contracts, collaborating with data scientists, engineering, and product teams to enable fast, trustworthy analyses across Perplexity’s

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in analytics engineering, data engineering, data science, or related roles.
• Deep SQL expertise with complex warehouse queries, joins, grain, and edge cases.
• Hands-on dbt experience in production; dimensional modeling, data contracts, testing.
• Strong ability to translate messy requirements into trusted models and metrics.
• Experience with warehouse administration, permissions, performance tuning, and cost management.
• Governance mindset covering ownership, lineage, retention, privacy, auditability.

Responsibilities

• Own and optimize core data pipelines and warehouse workflows for speed and reliability.
• Define and enforce data modeling standards, naming conventions, tests, and reviews.
• Lead data governance practices across the analytical warehouse with stakeholders.
• Build AI-assisted workflows for QA, documentation, and automation; reduce manual firefighting.

Skills

SQL excellence

Data modeling

dbt patterns

Stakeholder communication

Security and privacy mindset

AI-assisted development

Autonomy and execution

Tools

Databricks

Snowflake

Python

Metadata/semantics tooling

Job description

Perplexity AI is seeking an analytics engineer or data engineer to build the foundation of an AI-native data organization. You will design core data models, pipelines, semantic layers, and governance practices that power the company’s analytics and AI agents, while ensuring privacy and security.

You will own warehouse architecture, performance, and scalable data contracts, collaborating with data scientists, engineering, and product teams to enable fast, trustworthy analyses across Perplexity’s