Member of Technical Staff (Model Behavior)

Perplexity
San Francisco / Palo Alto2026-07-30Hybrid

About the job

We're hiring software engineers for the Model Behavior team to help shape how Perplexity’s AI products behave: the style of their responses, and the way they use tools, skills, and memory. The team designs prompt and context engineering strategies to deliver high-quality user experiences across multiple domains and models.

Responsibilities

- Context Engineering: Design, test, and optimize the prompts, skills, tools, and memory that shape Perplexity responses across products, features, and use cases. Build self-improvement loops to steer the prompt, improve tool/skill use, and improve the ability to draw on memory.

- Model Releases: Help experiment with and release new models.

- Research & Analysis: Identify inconsistencies and failure modes in model outputs through well-designed research projects, for both internal and production systems.

- 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, and bring the best ideas back to the team.

Qualifications

Minimum

- 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.

Preferred

- Recent experience working on modern LLM-driven products.

- Experience working across teams or with external partners.

- Experience designing evaluations or benchmarks for AI systems.