Strategic Finance Lead, Perplexity

• Exceptional analytical skills with an ability to synthesize data into compelling insights and develop complex financial operating models
• Extraordinary problem-solving and critical thinking abilities to develop new frameworks for assessing utilization and capital efficiency in a rapidly evolving industry
• Attention to detail and patience for getting to the source of truth on complex and interconnected contract and usage data
• Comfort being the finance person in the room with engineering leads and vendor counterparts, and adept at communicating complex financial information to non-finance audiences
• A proven track record of partnering with technical teams to drive financial optimization initiatives, building enough trust to become indispensable to their roadmap and resourcing decisions
• A bias toward action, strong work ethic, and experience driving operational outcomes under tight timelines
• Background in AI, ML, or high-performance, large-scale computing infrastructure, including data centers and cloud service providers

Desirable

• We are seeking a Strategic Finance Lead for our GPU compute fleet. In this role, you will be a key partner to our inference and infrastructure teams, providing financial expertise to optimize our compute investments and drive capacity decisions
• In this role, you'll develop deep expertise in the economics of AI compute, from token-level serving cost to the long-range financial planning of our GPU fleet. You'll build the models that inform Perplexity's capacity and make-versus-buy decisions, own the internal-cost analysis that underpins internal and external token pricing, and translate complex infrastructure dynamics into clear financial narratives for leadership
• This is a high-impact role for someone who thrives at the intersection of finance and infrastructure, and who is energized by building frameworks from scratch in a fast-moving environment
• Finance lead for GPU compute spend, including budgeting, monthly forecasting, variance analysis, and financial plan maintenance
• Build and maintain detailed bottoms-up financial models for the GPU fleet, including capacity forecasts, cost driver analyses, and investment scenario modeling
• Develop deep expertise in GPU vendor contracts, pricing structures, and cost drivers, and surface optimization opportunities across the fleet
• Serve as subject matter expert for Perplexity's compute capacity plan, owning source of truth on utilization, committed-versus-consumed spend, and capacity by vendor and cluster
• Build internal token-cost curves distinguishing marginal from fully loaded serving cost, and translate them into internal and external token pricing
• Analyze the ROI of in-house inference and training, including opportunity cost across chip types, cluster configurations, and workloads, distilled into a framework for capacity deployment
• Partner closely with inference and infrastructure engineering to understand how serving and training workloads scale, and translate those technical dynamics into financial frameworks