UK Internship Program

Overview

Perplexity is excited to offer an internship program for exceptional Master’s or PhD students studying Computer Science or Engineering in the UK, for the 2025–2026 academic year. This intensive program provides hands-on experience with our AI Inference team, offering a unique opportunity to gain experience at a rapidly growing AI startup. Outstanding performers may be offered a full-time position at the end of the program.

About the AI Inference Team

The AI Inference team is responsible for running the models behind Perplexity products. The team maintains the inference engine and deployments behind models ranging from single-node embeddings to distributed sparse Mixture-of-Experts models, managing large GPU clusters. With a focus on latency and throughput, the Inference team handles the entire serving stack, from GPU kernels to networking and monitoring infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Work with the inference team to improve serving latency and throughput
• Bring up support for new models and state-of-the-art inference optimizations or quantization schemes
• Optimize inference across the entire stack, from GPU kernels to serving endpoints

Qualifications

• Strong engineering track record with fundamentals and programming languages (multithreaded programming, networking, compilation, systems programming, etc.)
• Pursuing a Master’s or PhD in Computer Science with a focus on performance-related subjects (HPC, Compilers, Distributed Systems)
• Experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX)
• Experience with GPU programming (CUDA, Triton)
• Experience with High-Performance Computing (OpenMPI)

Schedule

• Internship program: 13 weeks, full-time or part-time, in-person in the London office (hybrid schedule: 3 days in the office, 2 days WFH)

Interview Process

• Fill out the application on the Perplexity website
• If selected, People Ops and technical interviews will be involved
• Offer extended if you meet criteria and interests align
• Start date: a desk will be waiting for you in our London office

FAQ

• Do you sponsor visas? Can I apply if I need a visa to work in the UK?
  → Unfortunately, we are unable to sponsor visas.
• What if I’m on a student visa?
  → You need to seek approval from your university to determine if you are eligible to work full-time or part-time.
• How many internship spots are there?
  → We have 2–3 interns in the 2025 class.
• Is housing provided?
  → Housing is not provided.
• Is health insurance provided?
  → Health insurance is not provided for interns. Full-time employees receive health insurance and benefits.
• How many full-time offers are available at the end of the residency?
  → All outstanding performers may receive a full-time offer; there is no fixed limit.

At Perplexity, we have experienced tremendous growth and adoption since publicly launching the world's first fully functional conversational answer engine in 2022. We have grown from answering 2.5 million questions per day at the start of 2024 to around 20 million daily queries in December 2024. We also offer Perplexity Enterprise Pro, which counts leading companies like Nvidia, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Bridgewater, and Zoom as customers.

To support rapid expansion, we have raised significant funding from respected technology investors. Our investor base includes IVP, NEA, Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Naval Ravikant, Tobi Lutke, and others. In 2024, our employee base grew nearly 300%, and we are just getting started.

Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise, and may vary from stated amounts.