Member of Technical Staff (Machine Learning Research Engineer)
Berlin · Full-time · Posted Sep 23, 2026
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Location
- Berlin
About the role
- Perplexity is seeking a Machine Learning Research Engineer to build next-generation search technologies.
- The role focuses on advancing retrieval and ranking capabilities through model development and infrastructure optimization.
Responsibilities
- Improve search quality through models, data, and tools.
- Architect and build core components of the search platform and model stack.
- Design, train, and optimize large-scale deep learning models using PyTorch.
- Utilize distributed training frameworks such as PyTorch Distributed, DeepSpeed, and FSDP.
- Conduct research in representation learning, including contrastive, multilingual, and multimodal modeling.
- Deploy models, including boosting algorithms and LLMs, in a scalable and performant manner.
- Build and optimize RAG pipelines for grounding and answer generation.
- Collaborate with Data, AI, Infrastructure, and Product teams.
Requirements
- Deep understanding of search and retrieval systems, including quality evaluation principles and metrics.
- Proven track record with large-scale search or recommender systems.
- Strong proficiency with PyTorch, including distributed training and performance optimization.
- Expertise in representation learning, contrastive learning, and embedding space alignment.
- Strong publication record in AI/ML conferences or workshops such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, CVPR, or SIGIR.
- Self-driven with a strong sense of ownership and execution.
- Minimum of 3 years working on search, recommender systems, or closely related research areas.
Skills
- PyTorch
- PyTorch Distributed
- DeepSpeed
- FSDP
- Representation Learning
- Contrastive Learning
- Multimodal Modeling
- RAG
- LLMs
