# Denis Yarats

> Denis Yarats is the Belarus-born, American computer scientist, engineer and co-founder who serves as chief technology officer of Perplexity. His path runs from an ICPC World Finals team and engineering work on Bing and Quora, through reinforcement-learning research at Facebook AI Research and a PhD at New York University, to building a cited-answer engine with Aravind Srinivas, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski. His public remarks consistently return to a practical doctrine: work in small pieces, move quickly, verify the result and keep the interface simpler than the machinery behind it.

- **Role:** Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Perplexity
- **Organizations:** Perplexity, Facebook AI Research, New York University, Quora, Microsoft Bing, Belarusian State University
- **From:** Gomel, Belarus
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Belarusian State University, PhD in artificial intelligence / computer science, New York University
- **Known for:** Qualified for and competed in the 2011 ACM-ICPC World Finals with Belarusian State University, finishing 30th among the listed finalists., Co-authored Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixels, published at ICLR 2021., Co-authored DrQ-v2, which reported state-of-the-art results on DeepMind Control Suite visual-control tasks while training many tasks in eight hours on one GPU.

## Career timeline

- **2011** — Represented Belarusian State University at the ACM-ICPC World Finals in Orlando; the team placed 30th.
- **2011-2013** — Worked as a software development engineer at Microsoft on Bing.
- **2013-2016** — Worked at Quora as a machine-learning engineer and technical lead, including ranking systems.
- **2016-2022** — Worked at Facebook AI Research, first as an engineer and later as a research scientist.
- **2018-2022** — Completed doctoral research at New York University focused on reinforcement learning, deep learning, natural language and robotics.
- **2020** — Co-authored the DrQ paper on data augmentation for deep reinforcement learning from pixels; a near-simultaneous related paper introduced him to Aravind Srinivas.
- **2021** — Co-authored DrQ-v2, an efficient visual-control algorithm that the team released publicly.
- **2022** — Co-founded Perplexity with Aravind Srinivas, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski and became CTO.
- **2023-present** — Leads technology at Perplexity as it expands from cited answers toward research, browser and task-oriented products.
- **2024-present** — Has publicly identified as an angel investor, with disclosed investments including AI developer-tool companies.

## Achievements

- Qualified for and competed in the 2011 ACM-ICPC World Finals with Belarusian State University, finishing 30th among the listed finalists.
- Co-authored Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixels, published at ICLR 2021.
- Co-authored DrQ-v2, which reported state-of-the-art results on DeepMind Control Suite visual-control tasks while training many tasks in eight hours on one GPU.
- Built and released widely used open-source reinforcement-learning implementations, including DrQ, DrQ-v2, Proto-RL and PyTorch Soft Actor-Critic repositories.
- Co-founded Perplexity in 2022 and led its technical development as CTO from early prototypes into a global AI search and answer product.

## Latest updates

- **2025-06** — In a public Perplexity Labs AMA, Yarats said the company aims to unify quick answers, Pro Search, Deep Research, Labs and Comet into one experience that can research, present findings, support decisions and take action.
- **2025-06** — He said early Labs prototypes began in 2025 and went through many iterations and evaluations before release, with expanded capabilities still planned.
- **2024-06** — In a DataCamp interview, he described Perplexity's flat early engineering structure, its emphasis on speed and accuracy, and his support for open-source models.

## Links

- Website: https://cs.nyu.edu/~dy1042/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denisyarats
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/denisyarats
- GitHub: https://github.com/denisyarats

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/denis-yarats
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-26