Member of Technical Staff (Model Behavior)
Generate a McCoy IQ challenge in 30 seconds.
See how candidates think and approach the work this role demands, before the phone screen. We'll build a video challenge from this posting, and you can edit or share it before it goes live.
Key details
What makes this role novel
Model Behavior engineering—systematically designing prompts, context, tools, and memory to shape LLM outputs at scale—is a distinct discipline that emerged only with the rise of large language models in 2022–2023. The work combines prompt engineering, behavioral steering, and experimental optimization in ways that didn't exist before.
Job Description
About the Role
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.
The ideal candidate for this role has a strong software engineering background, and an analytical, experiment-driven approach to solving challenging problems. You’ll work on context and prompt engineering to shape model behavior and style, and to guide how models use tools, skills, and memory across our products.
What you'll do
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.
What We're Looking For
Required
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.
Nice to have
Recent experience working on modern LLM-driven products.
Experience working across teams or with external partners.
Experience designing evaluations or benchmarks for AI systems.
Audit details(provenance, verification trail, raw fields)
Core fields
perplexity:2c6ae16b-d03e-4e33-9d32-362c5388e956Provenance
perplexityVerification trail
This posting hasn't been probed by our closure verifier yet. Stream C runs on a rolling schedule against postings approaching the close-decision threshold.
LLM enrichment
See how we measure for definitions, or our corrections log for known issues. Found something wrong? Flag a correction.