---
title: 'Legal and Operations Engineering Lead at Perplexity'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/legal-and-operations-engineering-lead-perplexity-san-francisco-w4fdgk4t1nqj'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-18'
---

# Legal and Operations Engineering Lead at Perplexity

- **Company:** [Perplexity](https://feeny.ai/companies/perplexity)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $150k–$250k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-18
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity/971c4e14-6a13-4cd3-a473-015e29541a15

## Job description

Perplexity is looking for a dynamic and innovative contributor to join our team to help advance the business, improve the products we’re building, and revolutionize the way people search and interact with the internet. This unique role offers significant responsibility to apply and strengthen your technical background and combine your legal experience, and offers growth potential in other areas of an in-house practice group.

## About the Opportunity

We seek a technical lead to join our legal operations team to drive infrastructure development across our legal and operations team and support our ambitious growth trajectory within our rapidly growing AI technology company. This unique role will report to the Legal Operations Manager and partner with the General Counsel and VP, Operations on strategic planning, architecting, delivering, and transforming high-volume legal workflows into scalable, automated systems. We're seeking a sharp, innovative technical operations professional with strong business judgment, practical problem-solving skills, and a deep understanding of high-growth startup environments. Ideally, this person also brings legal expertise alongside technical know-how. You’ll build scalable processes and establish foundational systems that will scale with our growth. Success requires someone who is inquisitive, has entrepreneurial drive, and the agility to thrive in our fast-paced environment while shaping our non-technical orgs from the ground up at a cutting-edge AI technology company.

## About the Role

## Responsibilities

- Architect and build Perplexity's Legal and Operations Engineering platform — a coherent stack of agents, workflows, and evaluation infrastructure that replaces manual, high-volume legal work across commercial contracting, e-discovery, enterprise redlining, subsidiary governance, vendor onboarding, and litigation and matter management.
- Own the enterprise contracting automation system end-to-end.
- Ship the in-product legal surfaces built on Perplexity and Computer itself
- Consolidate today's ad-hoc legal bots, prompts, and scripts into a documented, observable, and reusable platform with clear conventions for personas, tools, evals, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
- Serve as the technical partner to the General Counsel. Translate complex, judgment-heavy legal workflows into engineered systems, and translate engineering constraints back to non-technical stakeholders.
- Evaluate, retire, or replace third-party tools where a purpose-built internal system gives us a structural advantage.
- Be the case study for forward-deployed engineering in non-engineering functions at Perplexity. Success here becomes the playbook for Legal, Recruiting, People, Workplace, and Operations.

## What You’ll Bring

- 3+ years of backend software engineering experience with a track record of shipping production systems at meaningful scale.
- A working knowledge of legal concepts, with some experience in legal operations or paralegal work is desired.
- Strong business judgment and practical problem-solving; comfortable making operational calls with incomplete information and calibrating risk in real time.
- Track record building scalable processes and foundational systems from scratch, not maintaining a mature function.
- Fluency with modern legal tech and AI tools; disciplined human-in-the-loop practices.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to work directly with senior legal, finance, and executive stakeholders.
- Entrepreneurial drive, intellectual curiosity, and agility to thrive in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment.

## Preferred Experience

- Prior experience at an AI-native, SaaS, or consumer technology company operating at Perplexity’s pace.
- Familiarity with e-billing platforms (e.g., Brightflag), matter management, CLM, and entity management systems.
- Comfort with ambiguity, rapid context-switching, and a builder mentality.

## About Perplexity

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Perplexity builds an AI-powered answer engine that delivers accurate, real-time answers to any question, serving curious minds and professionals who demand precision and speed.
- **Entity Type**: Private (total funding $1.7B across 16 rounds)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, Andy Konwinski

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI-powered search and knowledge retrieval, Software Development
- **Target customers**: B2C (general users), B2B (enterprise API customers), and power users seeking reliable information
- **Mission**: “AI for people who expect more – more accuracy, more agency, more signal, less noise.”

## Products & Services
- **Perplexity AI (Free Tier)**: Real-time conversational search engine that synthesizes web results with citations, accessible via web and mobile app. *Type*: SaaS
- **Perplexity Pro**: Subscription offering enhanced features such as advanced AI models, multimodal search, and increased usage limits. *Type*: SaaS (subscription)
- **Perplexity API Platform**: Enables developers to integrate Perplexity’s search and reasoning capabilities into their own applications. *Type*: API
- **Perplexity Browser Extension**: Brings AI-powered search directly into the browser for quick answers without leaving the page. *Type*: Browser extension

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available in provided sources (prior reports indicate ~$9B valuation as of 2024, but not confirmed in this data set)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $1.7B (16 rounds); annual revenue ~$50M (LinkedIn estimate)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not explicitly listed in provided search results; widely known investors include IVP, NEA, Jeff Bezos, and others (not sourced here)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 11.3% YoY to 1,152 employees; operates in 54 countries; LinkedIn followers grew 131.8% yearly to >1.6M; active hiring across 48+ open roles including AI Research, Engineering, and Go-to-Market teams

## Competitive Advantages
- **Real-time, cited answers**: Unlike traditional chatbots, Perplexity grounds answers in live web results with transparent sources, building trust and accuracy.
- **Multimodal and agentic capabilities**: Continuously pushes frontier research (e.g., query-aware context compression, agents for knowledge work) that differentiates from generic LLM interfaces.
- **Vertical integration from research to product**: In-house AI research team tackles open problems unique to Perplexity’s scale, enabling fast iteration on novel methods.
- **Strong brand and user base**: Rapid consumer adoption with millions of monthly active users and high engagement.

## Strategic Focus
- **Pushing the frontier of search**: Evolving from retrieval services to code generation, agents, and full autonomy in knowledge work.
- **Expanding enterprise and API revenue**: Growing B2B footprint with API platform and enterprise solutions.
- **Global hiring and office expansion**: Offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, Austin, Washington D.C., London, Berlin, and Belgrade, with “4 days in office” hybrid model.
- **Investing in AI research**: Dedicated research division (Perplexity Research) exploring reasoning, agents, and systems to redefine how people navigate the internet.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Environment**: “Thoughtful support” culture with emphasis on craftsmanship, ownership, entrepreneurship, scholarship, and partnership. Hybrid schedule (4 days in-office) based on location.
- **Perks**: Daily catered meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner in office), office snacks, ride home program, commuter benefits, home office reimbursement, fitness classes, gym memberships.
- **Compensation & Benefits**: Competitive salary and equity packages; retirement plans with company match; flexible PTO; holiday shutdown between Christmas and New Year; 12 weeks paid bonding leave; comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
- **Relocation & Visa Support**: Relocation assistance and visa/green card sponsorship for eligible roles. Partners with immigration firm to support the process.
- **Engineering Excellence**: “Technical assessment for relevant roles”; values hands-on contribution, broad skill sets, and merit-based evaluation. Frequent Tech Talks and exposure to greenfield AI research problems.

## Sources
1. [perplexity.ai/hub/careers](https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/careers)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity)
3. [perplexity.ai](https://www.perplexity.ai/)
4. [linkedin.com/company/perplexity-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/perplexity-ai)
5. [research.perplexity.ai](https://research.perplexity.ai/)

## Other roles at Perplexity

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- [Member of Technical Staff (iOS Engineer, Computer Growth)](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-ios-engineer-computer-growth-perplexity-san-francisco-dk908ym84acw) — San Francisco, CA
- [Director, Public Policy](https://feeny.ai/job/director-public-policy-perplexity-washington-sav38t03en4h) — Washington, DC
- [Technical Recruiter, AI](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-recruiter-ai-perplexity-san-francisco-p8ayc06ej16g) — San Francisco, CA
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- [Commercial Sales Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/commercial-sales-manager-perplexity-new-york-aekr8evt7dy5) — New York, NY
- [Enterprise Sales Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-sales-manager-perplexity-new-york-ytxkmp4pv896) — New York, NY
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