Legal and Operations Engineering Lead

Location: San Francisco; Palo Alto Workplace: Hybrid 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.