Internship - Search Machine Learning Engineer

Job summary

Responsibilities

Perplexity is looking for a Search Machine Learning Engineer Intern to help build the next generation of advanced search technologies, with a focus on retrieval and ranking. You will work closely with experienced engineers to improve search quality, experiment with new models, and ship features…

• Contribute to experiments that improve search quality through better models, data usage, and evaluation tools, under the guidance of senior engineers.
• Design and implement components of the search platform and model stack, including retrieval, ranking, and classification models.
• Train evaluating models (including LLM-based approaches) for retrieval, ranking, and classification tasks.
• Support deployment and monitoring of search and ranking models in a scalable and performant way.
• Help build and iterate on RAG pipelines for grounding and answer generation.

What they're looking for

• Strong foundation in machine learning and statistics, with coursework or projects related to information retrieval, ranking, or recommender systems.
• Experience with Python and common ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) through academic, open source, or personal projects.
• Familiarity with evaluating model quality using offline metrics and/or A/B testing is a plus, but not required.
• Previous experience (internships, research, or significant projects) working on search, recommendation, or NLP is a plus, but not required.
• Self-driven and curious, with a strong sense of ownership, willingness to learn, and comfort working in a fast-paced environment

Tech stack

• RAG
• Python
• PyTorch
• TensorFlow
• JAX
• Rust