Internship - Machine Learning Research Engineer
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Get Started FreeAbout interviewing at Perplexity
One of the few AI startups with a fully published interview guide (perplexity.ai/hub/careers/interview-guide): online application (response within two weeks) → recruiter phone screen → a technical screen that for engineers is 'usually a standard technical programming interview' → a quickly-scheduled onsite of 4–5 interviews including a hiring-manager deep dive on past work and experience anecdotes → a final interview with a Perplexity founder or leader → decision within a week of the onsite. Coding leans Python and mixes LeetCode medium–hard with practical search-flavored tasks (ranking/filtering, concurrency, data handling); system design is AI-native (RAG pipelines, retrieval at scale, LLM serving cost/latency). Applicants are judged 'solely on merit and potential impact' and must show 'frontier knowledge and excellence in at least one area'; roles are broad by default with team matching happening during the onsite, every role — managers included — is hands-on, and building AI products isn't expected but fluency in using AI tools is required. In-person 4 days/week near an office; remote is case-by-case.
Read the full Perplexity interview process →Description
Internship Program Berlin
Internship program: 12 - 24 weeks, full-time, in-person in the Berlin office.
Responsibilities
Relentlessly push search quality forward — through models, data, tools, or any other leverage available.
Train, and optimize large-scale deep learning models using frameworks like PyTorch, leveraging distributed training (e.g., PyTorch Distributed, DeepSpeed, FSDP) and hardware acceleration, with a focus on retrieval and ranking models.
Conduct research in representation learning, including contrastive learning, multilingual, evaluation, and multimodal modeling for search and retrieval.
Build and optimize RAG pipelines for grounding and answer generation.
Qualifications
Understanding of search and retrieval systems, including quality evaluation principles and metrics.
Strong proficiency with PyTorch, including experience in distributed training techniques and performance optimization for large models.
Interested in representation learning, including contrastive learning, dense & sparse vector representations, representation fusion, cross-lingual representation alignment, training data optimization and robust evaluation.
Publication record in AI/ML conferences or workshops (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, SIGIR).
More engineering roles at Perplexity
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Member of Technical Staff (Machine Learning Research Engineer)