Commercial Counsel/Senior Counsel

San Francisco, New York

About the role

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. The ideal candidate brings deep experience negotiating a wide range of commercial technology agreements, including infrastructure and compute procurement 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.

Responsibilities

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.

Qualifications

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.
Prior experience with infrastructure agreements is strongly preferred, including compute procurement (e.g., GPU capacity and cloud/neocloud agreements, colocation, and related SLA and acceptance terms).
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.

Title and Pay dependent on YOE (Counsel or Senior Counsel)

About Perplexity

Perplexity interprets user queries using large language models and performs real-time searches across multiple data sources to compile relevant insights. It provides features such as conversational querying, contextual follow-up, and model selection for different response types. The platform includes advanced capabilities such as iterative deep research, in which multiple searches and source evaluations are conducted automatically to produce comprehensive outputs. Each response is accompanied by references, enabling verification and further exploration of original materials.