Data Scientist

Perplexity is AI for people who expect more. This role brings that same standard to how our data team works - with AI at the center of everything we do.

We re looking for someone who s been a great data scientist, analytics engineer, or data engineer - the kind of person who knows which metric actually matters, who can design an A/B test that answers the real question, who s gone deep on a data model because something didn t add up - and who has decided that the highest-leverage thing they can do next is build AI systems that fundamentally change how data science gets done
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Not another text-to-SQL bot. Not another dashboard. You ll build AI agents that conduct full analyses autonomously - forming hypotheses, writing and running queries, interpreting results, and drafting recommendations. You ll make the entire data warehouse AI-readable so any system can query it accurately. You ll create self-healing pipelines that detect and fix data issues before anyone notices. You ll build the infrastructure that turns a small data team into one that operates at 10x its size.

You ll join a data team that s already using AI across its workflows - but we know there s a much bigger opportunity ahead. We have buy-in from leadership to make it happen. Now we re building a team dedicated to taking what we ve started and turning it into something world-class: scalable systems, new tools, and an AI-native way of working that doesn t just make us world-class - but pushes the entire industry forward.

• Accelerate the AI-native data workflow - the team is already working this way. You ll take what s working and turn it into repeatable systems, scalable tools, and patterns that the data team and the entire company can adopt

• Build AI agents that do data science - not just answer SQL questions, but conduct end-to-end analyses: explore data, form hypotheses, run queries, interpret results, and generate actionable recommendations

• Make the warehouse AI-readable - build the semantic layer, context, and retrieval infrastructure that lets any AI system (internal or product) query Perplexity s data accurately and reliably

• Automate the data lifecycle - self-healing pipelines, automated dbt model generation and validation, data quality agents that detect, diagnose, and fix issues autonomously

• Ship AI-powered experiment analysis - agents that interpret A/B test results, flag statistical issues, and draft ship/no-ship recommendations for product teams

• Own the full lifecycle - from identifying the highest-leverage problem, to prototyping with LLMs, to iterating on accuracy and UX, to production deployment and monitoring

• Turn the data team into a product team - build internal data products that stakeholders across the company actually use daily, replacing ad-hoc requests with self-serve AI interfaces

• 6-8+ years in data science, analytics engineering, or a related role - you ve been in the data trenches

• Strong product sense - you ve worked closely with product and business teams, you understand what drives user behavior, and you have good instincts for what to measure and what to build

• Deep SQL expertise - you think in SQL, you ve built data models, you know your way around a warehouse

• Pipeline experience - you ve built and maintained data pipelines, worked with dbt, dealt with data quality issues firsthand

• Enough software engineering chops to be dangerous - you can build and ship a working tool in Python, not just a notebook. You can wrangle APIs, deploy a service, write code that other people can maintain. You re not a SWE, but you re not afraid of production

• Genuinely excited about AI - you ve been building with LLMs on your own time. You have opinions about which models are good  ve tried building agents, RAG systems, or AI-powered workflows. You follow the space obsessively because you think it s going to change everything - including how data teams work

• Builder mentality - you see a manual process and you can t help but automate it. You ship fast and iterate

• Autonomy - this is a new function. You ll define the roadmap as much as execute it

• Experience with
  dbt (building and maintaining production…