Member of Technical Staff (Search Crawler Analyst)

Perplexity; United States; Remote; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking a data-focused engineer to join our crawling and indexing efforts, combining data analysis with engineering to improve metrics, pipelines, and quality of our search and answer systems.

You will diagnose quality issues in crawling, train small models that optimize parsing quality, build datasets for model training, improve page selection for indexing, and design experiments to validate improvements.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in data analysis, ML engineering, or related roles.
• Strong coding skills enabling production-grade code at a mid-level backend engineer level.
• 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 labeling pipelines.
• Improve page selection algorithms for indexing.
• Design and analyze experiments to validate improvements.

Skills

4+ years exp

Coding skills

Metrics design

Production ML

Web crawling

Job description

The internet is vast, containing trillions of URLs. the company’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