Legal and Operations Engineering Lead

Details

Perplexity is seeking a dynamic and innovative technical contributor to advance the business, improve its products, and help revolutionize how people search and interact with the internet. This role combines technical engineering expertise with legal operations knowledge and offers growth potential within an in-house practice group.

About the Opportunity

The technical lead will join the legal operations team and drive infrastructure development across the legal and operations organization at a rapidly growing AI technology company. Reporting to the Legal Operations Manager and partnering with the General Counsel and VP of Operations, this person will help plan, architect, deliver, and transform high-volume legal workflows into scalable, automated systems.

The role requires strong business judgment, practical problem-solving skills, and an understanding of high-growth startup environments. The successful candidate will build scalable processes and foundational systems, while working with non-technical organizations in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build Perplexity's Legal and Operations Engineering platform, including a coherent stack of agents, workflows, and evaluation infrastructure to replace 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 in-product legal surfaces built on Perplexity and Computer itself.
• Consolidate ad hoc legal bots, prompts, and scripts into a documented, observable, and reusable platform with clear conventions for personas, tools, evaluations, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
• Serve as the technical partner to the General Counsel by translating complex, judgment-heavy legal workflows into engineered systems and communicating engineering constraints to non-technical stakeholders.
• Evaluate, retire, or replace third-party tools where a purpose-built internal system provides a structural advantage.
• Establish a model for forward-deployed engineering in non-engineering functions at Perplexity, with potential applications across Legal, Recruiting, People, Workplace, and Operations.

Requirements

• 7+ years of backend software engineering experience with a track record of shipping production systems at meaningful scale.
• Working knowledge of legal concepts; experience in legal operations or paralegal work is desirable.
• Strong business judgment and practical problem-solving skills, including the ability to make operational decisions with incomplete information and calibrate risk in real time.
• Experience building scalable processes and foundational systems from scratch rather than maintaining a mature function.
• Fluency with modern legal technology and AI tools, including disciplined human-in-the-loop practices.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work directly with senior legal, finance, and executive stakeholders.
• Entrepreneurial drive, intellectual curiosity, and agility in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment.

Preferred Experience

• Experience at an AI-native, SaaS, or consumer technology company operating at a fast pace.
• Familiarity with e-billing platforms such as Brightflag, matter management, contract lifecycle management, and entity management systems.
• Comfort with ambiguity, rapid context-switching, and a builder mentality.

Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees receive benefits including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care accounts. International employees receive benefits tailored to their region of residence.