Staff Engineer, Model Behavior & Prompt Engineering

Perplexity; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is hiring software engineers for the Model Behavior team to shape how Perplexity’s AI products respond: the style of responses, and how they use tools, skills, and memory. You’ll design prompts and context strategies across domains and models.

The ideal candidate has a strong software engineering background and an analytical, experiment-driven approach to solving challenging problems. You’ll work on context and prompt engineering to guide model behavior, tool usage, memory systems,

Qualifications

• 2 to 10+ years of experience in software engineering or research.
• Strong background in software engineering fundamentals, and a technical understanding of LLM-driven and agentic systems.
• Experience shaping LLM behavior through prompts, tool and skill design, or memory systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, particularly in explaining complex concepts to diverse stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, test, and optimize prompts, skills, tools, and memory to shape Perplexity responses across products and use cases.
• Experiment with and release new models.
• Identify inconsistencies and failure modes in model outputs through research projects.

Skills

Software engineering fundamentals

LLM-driven systems

Prompt design

Communication

Job description

Perplexity is hiring software engineers for the Model Behavior team to shape how Perplexity’s AI products respond: the style of responses, and how they use tools, skills, and memory. You’ll design prompts and context strategies across domains and models.

The ideal candidate has a strong software engineering background and an analytical, experiment-driven approach to solving challenging problems. You’ll work on context and prompt engineering to guide model behavior, tool usage, memory systems,