Commercial Counsel/Senior Counsel, Perplexity
$200-265k
+ Equity
More information about location
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Open for applications
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$200-265k
+ Equity
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- The ideal candidate brings deep experience negotiating a wide range of commercial technology agreements, a strong command of data privacy and security frameworks, and the practical judgment to make principled risk calls independently
- This is a high-impact, hands-on role for someone who thrives in fast-paced environments, knows how to be a true partner to the business without being a bottleneck, and is excited to help build a best-in-class legal function at one of the most consequential AI companies in the world
- JD and in good standing with an active U.S. state bar membership
- At least 5+ years of law firm and/or in-house experience, with a track record of drafting and negotiating complex commercial technology agreements
- Strong business acumen and ability to partner effectively with sales, product, engineering, and executive teams
- Deep familiarity with data privacy and security frameworks (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, SOC 2, HIPAA) and experience negotiating DPAs and related compliance agreements
- Ability to communicate clearly with business and technical audiences and effectively translate legal concepts for non-lawyers
- Hands-on attitude to tackle projects large and small, low-ego approach to working across the organization
- Positive collaborative attitude, comfort with ambiguity and a fast pace, high level of integrity, and intellectual curiosity about AI technology and how these products work
- Comfortable working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment
What the job involves
- Perplexity is looking for a commercially minded attorney to join our Legal team
- In this role, you’ll own the full commercial legal lifecycle
- You will draft, negotiate, and close a wide range of agreements across partnerships, procurement, infrastructure, and licensing
- You will build scalable legal infrastructure, and enable the business to move quickly without unacceptable risk
- You’ll work closely with teams across the business, including product, engineering, security, finance, and sales to close deals, strengthen our data security and compliance posture, and serve as a trusted advisor on the AI-specific legal questions that come with operating at the frontier of this technology
- Lead end-to-end drafting, review, and negotiation of commercial agreements, including MSAs, SaaS and API agreements, DPAs, partnership and reseller agreements, strategic collaboration and co-marketing agreements, procurement and vendor contracts, technology and infrastructure agreements, and IP licensing arrangements
- Serve as a primary legal partner across the business, providing fast, practical, and business-aligned counsel that accelerates deal velocity without compromising on risk management
- Provide strategic counsel on legal risks across AI infrastructure, compute, partnerships, and enterprise deployments as the company scales
- Advise on AI-specific legal considerations in commercial agreements, including acceptable use, data retention and training restrictions, output liability, and evolving regulatory requirements (e.g., EU AI Act, CCPA/CPRA, GDPR)
- Build and maintain scalable legal infrastructure—contract templates, negotiation playbooks, fallback positions, and tools (e.g., CLM, self-serve workflows)—to support high-volume deal flow and reduce friction in the contracting cycle
- Partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Security, Finance, and Compliance teams to surface and address legal risk early, particularly on data use, enterprise integrations, and customer-specific compliance requirements
- Monitor the evolving regulatory landscape for enterprise AI and SaaS products and translate emerging requirements into practical contractual and policy guidance for internal stakeholders
Our take
As AI continues to drive changes in both business operations and day-to-day lives, Perplexity delivers an intelligent search engine powered by conversational AI, to improve search outcomes and "unlock the power of knowledge" for all.
Reaching impressive heights of 22M monthly visits, Perplexity's "ask anything" method of search is clearly a popular one. And what sets it apart from other search engines is in its answers, which are concise and fully cited, responding to the user query rather than simply providing a place in which they can scroll to find it themselves.
The company has raised substantial funding, with contributions from former execs at companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Quora, demonstrating the interest that it has drummed up in the space. Having doubled its annual recurring revenue between 2023 and 24, this investment has allowed Perplexity to continue building out its product, and accelerate growth into the future.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Sep 2025
$200m
LATE VC
Jul 2025
$100m
LATE VC
Total funding: $1.8bn
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Aravind Srinivas
(Co-Founder, President & CEO)Former Research Scientist at OpenAI, who has interned in Research at Google and Deep Mind. Obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Denis Yarats
(Co-Founder & CTO)Prior to co-founding Perplexity in 2022, Denis was an AI Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research, a Staff ML Engineer at Quora, and a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft.
Johnny Ho
(Co-Founder & CSO)Previously a Quantitative Trader at Tower Research Capital, and Engineer at Quora.
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