Staff Engineer - Model Behavior & Prompt Systems

Perplexity; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 330,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity in Palo Alto seeks software engineers for the Model Behavior team to shape how its AI products respond, including prompt style, tool usage, and memory integration.

You will design prompt and context engineering strategies, run experiments, and collaborate with cross‑functional teams to improve reliability and user experience. This role emphasizes strong software fundamentals, analytical thinking, and clear communication.

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

• Context Engineering: Design, test, and optimize prompts, skills, tools, and memory that shape Perplexity responses across products and use cases.
• Model Releases: Help experiment with and release new models.
• Research & Analysis: Identify inconsistencies and failure modes in model outputs through well-designed research projects.
• Knowledge Sharing: Help engineers across teams build intuition for prompt design and context engineering best practices.
• Staying Current: Track the latest prompting, context engineering, and alignment techniques from industry and academia.

Skills

Software engineering

LLM systems

Prompts design

Memory systems

Communication

Job description

Perplexity in Palo Alto seeks software engineers for the Model Behavior team to shape how its AI products respond, including prompt style, tool usage, and memory integration.

You will design prompt and context engineering strategies, run experiments, and collaborate with cross‑functional teams to improve reliability and user experience. This role emphasizes strong software fundamentals, analytical thinking, and clear communication.