WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 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 at what. You'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

BONUS

• Experience with dbt (building and maintaining production models)
• Snowflake administration and optimization
• You've built Slack bots, internal CLI tools, or developer productivity tools that people actually used
• Background in AI agent frameworks
• Experience with BI tools - you know what's worth automating because you've done the manual version
• A/B testing and experimentation - you've designed experiments and analyzed results
• Early-stage startup experience

WHY THIS ROLE

• Set the standard for the industry - the team is already using AI across its work. You'll be the one who turns that into something other data orgs look to as the benchmark
• Recursive AI - Perplexity builds an AI answer engine for the world. You'll build one for the company. Few places offer this kind of alignment between the product and the work
• Frontier models, day one - you're at an AI company with access to frontier infrastructure and people who deeply understand what's possible
• Massive leverage - the systems you build will multiply the output of every data team member and every stakeholder who needs data
• Direct impact - small team, no layers of approval. Idea to shipped system in days, not quarters