AI Research Lead

🇺🇸 San Francisco, California
$3K - $5K Annual
Posted 9 months ago
Expires June 9, 2026
Full TimeOn-siteEngineeringData Science

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 an...

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