AI Research Lead (Palo Alto)

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022 and growing rapidly as one of the worlds leading AI platforms. Perplexity has raised over $1B in venture investment from some of the worlds most visionary and successful leaders, including Elad Gil, Daniel Gross, Jeff Bezos, Accel, IVP, NEA, NVIDIA, Samsung, and many more. Our objective is to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making for people and assistive AI wherever decisions are being made. Throughout human history, change and innovation have always been driven by curious people. Today, curious people use Perplexity to answer more than 780 million queries every montha number thats growing rapidly for one simple reason: everyone can be curious.

Perplexity is seeking an exceptional AI Research Tech Lead to drive our research strategy and lead the development of our in-house Online LLMs, the Sonar models. In this leadership role, you will set the macro research direction across different modalities, mentor a team of researchers, and take advantage of our rich query/answer dataset to continue scaling our Sonar model performance and deliver the SOTA Online LLM experience to our users.

Responsibilities

Research Leadership & Strategy

• Define and execute the macro research direction across multiple modalities, including post-training LLMs for agent trajectories and future mid-training initiatives
• Lead strategic research planning and roadmap development to advance Sonar model capabilities
• Drive innovation in supervised and reinforcement learning techniques for query answering
• Collaborate with leadership to align research priorities with product and business objectives

Team Development & Mentorship

• Coach and mentor a team of AI research scientists and engineers, fostering their technical and professional growth
• Establish the long-term macro research direction across the team, including our direction across different modalities
• Lead hiring and onboarding of new research talent
• Create a collaborative environment that encourages knowledge sharing and innovation

Technical Excellence

• Post-train SOTA LLMs on query answering using cutting-edge supervised and reinforcement learning techniques
• Own and optimize the full stack data, training, and evaluation pipelines required for LLM post-training
• Deliver Sonar models that provide SOTA query answering performance
• Drive research into agent trajectories and multi-modal capabilities
• Lead the technical roadmap for eventual mid-training investments

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with engineering teams to integrate Sonar models into our product
• Partner with product teams to understand user needs and translate them into research priorities
• Collaborate with data teams to leverage our unique query/answer dataset effectively
• Communicate research progress and findings to stakeholders across the organization

Qualifications

Required

• Minimum of 5 years of experience working on relevant AI/ML projects with 3**+ years in a technical leadership role**
• Proven track record of leading and mentoring technical and research teams
• A Computer Science graduate degree at a premier academic intitution
• Deep expertise with large-scale LLMs and Deep Learning systems
• Strong programming skills with versatility across multiple languages and frameworks
• Demonstrated ability to set technical vision and drive execution
• Experience with pre-training and post-training techniques (self-supervised learning along with SFT/DPO/GRPO/PPO)
• Self-starter with exceptional ownership mentality and ability to work in ambiguous environments
• Passion for solving challenging problems and pushing the boundaries of AI research

Nice-to-have

• PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, or related areas
• Experience with agent-based AI systems and multi-modal model development
• Background in mid-training or pre-training of large language models
• Publications in top-tier AI/ML conferences
• Experience in fast-paced startup environments
• Track record of translating research into production systems

Compensation & Benefits

Our cash compensation range for this role is $370,000 - $460,000.

Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.