Staff Engineer, Evaluation & LLM Infrastructure

Perplexity; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity in Palo Alto is seeking an experienced engineer to advance Answer Quality by building evaluation infrastructure and agent-trace analysis platforms. You will collaborate with data scientists, engineers, and product teams to turn evaluation findings into product improvements.

The role demands 4+ years shipping production systems, strong Python and SQL, and experience with large-scale data processing platforms. This on-site position offers a high-impact, fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software, data, or ML engineering experience 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.

Responsibilities

• Build shared evaluation infrastructure that helps teams run reliable evals, analyze results, and make product 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

Distributed systems

Production systems

Data pipelines

Ownership of projects

Tools

Databricks

Snowflake

ClickHouse

Job description

Perplexity in Palo Alto is seeking an experienced engineer to advance Answer Quality by building evaluation infrastructure and agent-trace analysis platforms. You will collaborate with data scientists, engineers, and product teams to turn evaluation findings into product improvements.

The role demands 4+ years shipping production systems, strong Python and SQL, and experience with large-scale data processing platforms. This on-site position offers a high-impact, fast-paced environment.