# AI Research Tech Lead

**Company**: Perplexity
**Location**: San Francisco
**Work arrangement**: onsite
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $300K - $485K
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity/16bc54a6-83ab-4802-8a65-d88fbb7ebe03?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_a70707e8-c7a

## Description

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.

## What you'll do

- 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

## What you need

- 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 institution

- 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

## Skills

### Required
- AI/ML
- Deep Learning
- Large-scale LLMs
- Technical Leadership
- Programming

### Nice to have
- Agent-based AI systems
- Multi-modal model development
- Mid-training or pre-training of large language models
- Publications in top-tier AI/ML conferences

---

Source: [Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity/16bc54a6-83ab-4802-8a65-d88fbb7ebe03?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)