Staff Research Scientist, AI Security & Privacy

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

Job summary

Perplexity's Secure Intelligence Institute seeks researchers and engineers to advance security and privacy in frontier AI systems. You will conduct original research and translate findings into practical protections for millions of users.

You will develop threat models, analyze threats, and build defenses, with collaboration across security engineering and external researchers. Publish results at premier venues and contribute to the AI security community.

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent research experience in security/privacy.
• Publications at top security venues demonstrate impact.
• Deep expertise in security of agentic systems and web security.
• Proficiency in Python; TypeScript/Go/Rust bonus.
• Ability to work independently in a fast-paced environment.
• Clear, concise communication of attack narratives to engineers and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Develop threat models for emerging attack surfaces in AI-native products.
• Identify and analyze security and privacy threats across AI systems, infrastructure, and user-facing products.
• Develop novel defenses, mitigations, and detection mechanisms for security and privacy in AI-native products.
• Build security evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and datasets to measure the effectiveness of different defense mechanisms.
• Partner with Perplexity’s Security Engineering team to translate state of the art research into shipped security features and hardened system architectures.
• Collaborate with top-tier academic and industry researchers in SII's external research network.
• Publish findings at premier venues and contribute to the broader security research community.

Skills

PhD in security

Security research

Python

Independent work

Technical communication

Education

PhD in Computer Science/Engineering

Job description

Perplexity's Secure Intelligence Institute seeks researchers and engineers to advance security and privacy in frontier AI systems. You will conduct original research and translate findings into practical protections for millions of users.

You will develop threat models, analyze threats, and build defenses, with collaboration across security engineering and external researchers. Publish results at premier venues and contribute to the AI security community.