Member of Technical Staff (software Engineer, Computer Growth)

Perplexity Perplexity · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Product Engineering

Software Engineer on the Growth team at Perplexity, focusing on building applied AI systems to drive user activation, onboarding, conversion, retention, and paid upgrades for their AI products. The role involves end-to-end ownership of growth surfaces and experiments, including training and productionizing ML models.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design, build, and own growth surfaces across the full funnel — activation, onboarding, SEO, lifecycle, conversion, retention, and paid upgrade moments — for Computer and every Perplexity product.
  2. Lead experiments end-to-end, from hypothesis and instrumentation through implementation, analysis, and rollout, shipping many in parallel and learning quickly from each.
  3. Build applied AI systems that power growth: classifiers for high-intent segments, personalization for value discovery, and AI-driven onboarding and recommendation surfaces.
  4. Launch vertical-specific experiences (e.g., students, enterprise organizations) that connect new AI capabilities to measurable adoption and revenue outcomes.
  5. Hill-climb on the metrics that matter: activation rate, paid conversion, retention, and habit formation, instrumented with clean data and trustworthy experiment readouts.

Skills

Required

  • 2+ years of professional software engineering experience
  • Full-stack engineering skills
  • modern web stack (Next.js, React, TypeScript, Python)
  • Strong execution
  • ship many experiments and product improvements in parallel
  • drive them to a clear outcome
  • Familiarity with A/B testing and experimentation platforms (Eppo, Statsig, Optimizely, or in-house equivalents)
  • Comfort with SQL
  • data-informed decision-making
  • Strong product judgment
  • Self-motivated
  • strong ownership instincts

Nice to have

  • Direct experience on a growth, activation, conversion, retention, or lifecycle team at a consumer or PLG/self-serve SaaS company
  • Experience training and productionizing ML models (classifiers, ranking, personalization)
  • connecting them to product surfaces
  • Experience with SEO, lifecycle marketing tooling, or paid acquisition surfaces
  • Familiarity with subscription and/or usage based billing products, paywalls, or paid upgrade experimentation
  • Experience shipping for both consumer and enterprise audiences
  • Time spent at a fast-growing startup or on a high-ownership engineering team
  • Familiarity with mobile development - Swift/Objective-C/Kotlin/Java, in-app payments, mobile release cycles, Apple App Store and/or Google Play Store guidelines, and rollout monitoring

What the JD emphasized

  • end-to-end projects
  • end-to-end
  • end-to-end
  • full funnel
  • full funnel
  • applied AI systems
  • applied AI systems
  • training and productionizing classifiers
  • personalization for value discovery
  • shipping contextual onboarding experiments
  • measurable adoption and revenue outcomes
  • fast experimentation
  • own the outcome end-to-end
  • own growth surfaces
  • ship it
  • ship many experiments and product improvements in parallel
  • drive them to a clear outcome
  • train and productionize ML models
  • connect them to product surfaces
  • ship features ahead of schedule
  • drive improvements without asking for permission

Other signals

  • building applied AI systems
  • shipping AI capabilities
  • training and productionizing classifiers
  • personalization for value discovery
  • AI-driven onboarding and recommendation surfaces