Staff AI Engineer: Prompt & Context Architect

Perplexity; California (MO); On-site; USD 110,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking a software engineer to join the Model Behavior team, shaping how AI products respond via prompts, tools, and memory usage. You will contribute to context engineering, prompt design, and experimental workflows across multiple domains.

The role emphasizes building robust evaluation, collaborating with engineers, researchers, and product teams to improve model behavior and user experiences. Strong fundamentals and clear communication are essential.

Qualifications

• 2 to 10+ years of software engineering or research experience.
• Strong fundamentals and understanding of LLM-driven systems.
• Experience shaping behavior through prompts, tools, or memory design.
• Excellent written and verbal communication with diverse stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, test, and optimize prompts, skills, tools, and memory to shape Perplexity responses.
• Build self-improvement loops to steer prompts and tool usage.
• Experiment with and release new models.
• Identify inconsistencies and failure modes through research.
• Share knowledge on prompt design and context engineering best practices.

Skills

Software engineering

LLM systems

Prompt design

Communication

Education

B.S. in Computer Science

Tools

Python

PyTorch

LLM tooling

Job description

Perplexity is seeking a software engineer to join the Model Behavior team, shaping how AI products respond via prompts, tools, and memory usage. You will contribute to context engineering, prompt design, and experimental workflows across multiple domains.

The role emphasizes building robust evaluation, collaborating with engineers, researchers, and product teams to improve model behavior and user experiences. Strong fundamentals and clear communication are essential.