Senior Commercial Counsel, Enterprise

Location: San Francisco; New York City Workplace: Hybrid Perplexity is looking for a senior commercial attorney to join our Legal team. We are looking for an independent, business-practical yet diligent-minded professional who can carry live deals, extend the infrastructure we have already built, and hold the line on the terms that matter as deal volume, complexity, and regulatory surface all grow. You will negotiate directly with large enterprise customers across a large variety of industries including financial services, healthcare, government, and other regulated industries, partner daily with Enterprise Sales, Partnerships, Deal Desk, Security, Privacy, Product, and Finance, and advise on the legal questions that come with agentic, retrieval, and API products deployed inside enterprise environments. This is a high-impact, hands-on role for someone who is genuinely a self starter. This role is for you if you get energy from ambiguous, first‑of‑their‑kind problems and enjoy designing repeatable approaches that scale. You default to enabling the business, frame risk in practical terms, and focus on durable structures rather than one‑off fixes. RESPONSIBILITIES - Independently lead end-to-end drafting, review, and negotiation of Enterprise customer agreements across our suite of offerings: Enterprise Pro, Enterprise Max, Computer, and API product lines, including MSAs, order forms, SaaS and API terms, DPAs, BAAs, security exhibits, customer-paper redlines, product-specific addenda, and public-sector vehicles such as GSA MAS orders and federal RFP responses. - Serve as a trusted legal partner to Enterprise Sales, Partnerships, Deal Desk, and Customer Success, providing fast, practical, business-aligned counsel that accelerates deal velocity, protects the terms that matter, and scales as the Sales organization grows. - Extend and maintain the existing Enterprise negotiation playbook, DPA and Privacy Notice architecture, product-specific term libraries, and fallback positions as our product surface, customer mix, and regulatory environment evolve, so that positions compound into reusable precedent rather than being re-litigated deal by deal. - Advise on AI-specific contract terms for enterprise deployments, including bespoke data postures; negotiate output ownership and liability, agentic-feature risk allocation and translate product operations into enterprise contract commitments. - Partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Security, Privacy, Finance, and Compliance to surface and address legal risk early, particularly on customer-data flows, enterprise integrations, model routing, and customer-specific compliance requirements. - Monitor the evolving regulatory landscape for enterprise AI, data protection, and public-sector procurement (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, HIPAA, DORA, EU AI Act, sector-specific frameworks) and translate emerging requirements into practical contractual positions and updated playbook guidance. - Represent Perplexity Legal externally on customer negotiation calls with counterparty counsel at sophisticated enterprises. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR - Exceptional communicator who owns deadlines, proactively manages internal and external expectations, and escalates early and clearly to protect deal timelines and momentum. - A proactive problem‑solver who defaults to “yes, and” when engaging with internal stakeholders: you look for ways to make deals work, frame risk clearly, and design long‑term, scalable solutions. - A disciplined drafter who favors surgical, minimal‑footprint edits over wholesale rewrites, grounds positions in documented rationale, and preserves material legal meaning and risk allocation under time pressure. - Someone who can articulate complex legal risk and concepts in the form of simple, actionable terms for non‑legal stakeholders, leads with practical “how to make this work” advice, and designs creative, long‑term solutions to novel, cutting‑edge challenges. - Someone genuinely excited by novel, cutting‑edge challenges in AI products and the commercial and regulatory questions they surface, and who enjoys turning ambiguity into clear, reusable approaches. QUALIFICATIONS - JD and in good standing with an active U.S. state bar membership. - At least 7+ years of combined law firm and in-house experience, with a substantial in-house component, and a demonstrated track record of independently owning complex enterprise SaaS or API deals from the vendor side, including work with regulated-industry customers (financial services, healthcare, or government). - Experience advising on commercial terms and pricing structures for high‑growth SaaS/API businesses, including usage‑based and tiered pricing, pilots, and expansion frameworks. - Familiarity with data protection and security frameworks (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, DORA, EU AI Act) and hands-on experience negotiating DPAs. - Strong business acumen and the ability to partner effectively with Sales, Deal Desk, Product, Security, and executive stakeholders on live deals under time pressure. - Proven ability to triage and progress multiple concurrent deals under tight timelines while maintaining rigorous diligence, clear risk assessment, and high‑quality documentation. - Demonstrated ability to build and extend durable legal infrastructure — playbooks, templates, precedent repositories, or self-serve tools. - Ability to communicate clearly with business and technical audiences and to translate legal concepts into usable guidance for non-lawyers, including Sales and Deal Desk. - Hands-on, can-do approach to tackle projects large and small, low-ego approach to working closely with the Director and across the organization, and judgment about when to escalate and when to close. - Positive collaborative attitude, comfort with ambiguity and a fast pace, high level of integrity, and intellectual curiosity about AI technology. NICE TO HAVE - Prior experience with public-sector contracting or with on-prem deployment structures. - Experience with AI-native contracting questions related to agentic products - Experience with contracting with regulated entities (financial institutions or health care), especially in the EU/UK.