I’m looking for information about job opportunities or how to apply at Perplexity AI. I checked their site but couldn’t find clear details. If anyone has experience with their hiring process or knows where openings are posted, I’d really appreciate your help.
Oh man, same boat here. Perplexity AI seems like they’re trying to be more mysterious than their own answers. Their website’s got very little on careers—just the basic ‘contact us’ thing, and that’s about as fun as cold emailing generic HR. I cruised LinkedIn to see if they posted any openings, but nada except for the odd old job listing that looks like it got dusted off from last year’s leftovers. I even tried stalking a few employees to see how THEY got in, but most of them just have “joined Perplexity in 2023” and not much more.
A buddy of mine did say they sometimes post roles in techy Discords or through word-of-mouth referrals, so it looks like networking might matter more than resume spam here. If you’ve got a mutual connection or can pull a ninja move on Twitter, maybe shoot your shot. Otherwise, their hiring process remains a more complicated riddle than some of their search outputs. Would love to hear if anyone actually landed a role there or if it’s just an open secret in tech. Maybe Perplexity AI’s real job is making us perplexed…
Honestly, the whole Perplexity AI hiring situation feels like an ARG at this point—a chain of secret handshakes only insiders understand. I get what @jeff’s saying about the Discords and the networking ninja stuff, but hot take: stealth hiring isn’t quite as exclusive as people think. Sometimes it just means they don’t want to handle a firehose of resumes from the public, which is kind of wild for a company trying to scale in AI. I stalked a few forums and Hacker News threads, and the vibe is that Perplexity brings folks on board mostly through targeted poaching or referral pipelines. Nobody seems to have landed an interview from a cold application in forever.
One thing slightly different from what jeff mentioned: I HAVE seen rare, random openings on AngelList (er, Wellfound now, ugh) but they disappear fast. Makes me think they might be fulfilling roles before they ever go public. The LinkedIn trick mostly leads to dead ends unless you’re already connected, so I’d suggest setting alerts there but not betting the farm.
IMHO, if you’re not living and breathing in Bay Area tech circles, you’ll probably need to approach it from another angle: think about what unique value or public presence you could offer. If you’ve contributed to open source AI projects or have a track record in the search/LLM/IR community, even just blogging or sharing technical insights on Twitter might get you a DM slide. That said, it’s all still a black box. Not a fan of this “hiring by secret society,” but hey, maybe that’s part of their charm—or their inefficiency, depending on how you look at it. If anyone cracks the case and gets through, spill the beans for the rest of us, please.
Let’s break it down: Perplexity AI’s hiring process is truly opaque, so no argument there with the “mystery box” descriptions from the other folks. But, real talk, stealth hiring isn’t the whole story. While Discord and Twitter networking can help, that’s not the only way in. If you want to increase your odds, try a more “loud and public” angle—launch a GitHub repo with tools relevant to what Perplexity is building (think retrieval-augmented generation, vector search, etc.), then tag them on socials. Yes, some folks have been recruited this way, usually after sharing practical demos or analyses that grab engineering leads’ attention. (Being visible in open source always trumps secret handshakes, IMO.)
As for the cold email skepticism: sure, results are rare, but I’ve seen one or two people claim in Hacker News threads they got an informational chat after sending a genuinely insightful message (think, “I built X that improves QA accuracy by Y%; here’s a live demo”). So don’t count it out totally, but bring value upfront.
Pros of :
- Augments your job hunt with next-gen AI research tools.
- Useful for tracking Perplexity’s public footprints, team interviews, and technical updates.
Cons:
- Not a substitute for warm intros or direct referrals.
- Might generate noise if you hit dead LinkedIn job posts or outdated blog content.
If you’re weighing Perplexity AI versus other AI unicorns (think Anthropic, Inflection, or even bustling upstarts like Character.AI), one plus is that Perplexity’s smaller public team can mean bigger visibility if you get in, but a big con is the secrecy—no centralized careers page, and fewer published interviews about team culture or growth tracks.
Bottom line: Treat Perplexity AI’s hiring as a hybrid of classic public portfolio and modern networking hustle. You can’t just spray resumes, but you don’t always need an insider fairy godparent, either. Hit them from multiple fronts—and if you figure out a more reliable method, circle back and clue us all in.