Staff Engineer - Answer Quality & Evaluation Platforms

Perplexity; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking an engineer for the Answer Quality team in San Francisco to strengthen evaluation foundations for prompts, tools, and models. You will help design and operate the infrastructure that measures agent performance and guides product improvements.

You will collaborate with data scientists, engineers, and product partners to turn evaluation findings into reliable, scalable solutions and to push forward production-grade systems.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software, data, or ML engineering shipping and operating production systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, with fundamentals in system design, data modeling, and distributed systems.
• Experience building big-data systems, including distributed compute, large-scale storage, and high-volume pipelines.
• Demonstrated ownership of ambiguous technical projects from initial design through production operation.
• Ability to work effectively with data scientists, engineers, and product partners.

Responsibilities

• Build shared evaluation infrastructure that helps teams run reliable evals, analyze results, and make product and model decisions
• Develop the platform for replaying and analyzing agent traces to reproduce production behavior and diagnose failures
• Build and operate scalable systems for processing, storing, and monitoring interaction, trace, and evaluation data
• Partner with data scientists, engineers, and product teams to turn answer-quality problems into evaluations, analyses, and product improvements
• Operate in a small, high-impact team where your work directly shapes how Perplexity measures and improves Answer Quality

Skills

Python

SQL

System design

Data modeling

Distributed systems

Production systems

Collaboration

Ownership

Tools

Databricks

Snowflake

ClickHouse

Job description

Perplexity is seeking an engineer for the Answer Quality team in San Francisco to strengthen evaluation foundations for prompts, tools, and models. You will help design and operate the infrastructure that measures agent performance and guides product improvements.

You will collaborate with data scientists, engineers, and product partners to turn evaluation findings into reliable, scalable solutions and to push forward production-grade systems.