Legal and Operations Engineering Lead

Responsibilities

• Architect and build Perplexity's Legal and Operations Engineering platform: a coherent stack of agents, workflows, and evaluation infrastructure for 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.
• Consolidate ad hoc legal bots, prompts, and scripts into a documented, observable, reusable platform with conventions for personas, tools, evaluations, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
• Serve as the technical partner to the General Counsel by translating complex legal workflows into engineered systems and communicating engineering constraints to nontechnical stakeholders.
• Evaluate, retire, or replace third-party tools when a purpose-built internal system provides a structural advantage.
• Establish a playbook for forward-deployed engineering in non-engineering functions, including 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 desired.
• Strong business judgment and practical problem-solving skills, with the ability to make operational decisions using incomplete information and calibrate risk in real time.
• Experience building scalable processes and foundational systems from scratch.
• Fluency with modern legal technology and AI tools, including disciplined human-in-the-loop practices.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including 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 rapid pace.
• Familiarity with e-billing platforms such as Brightflag, matter management, contract lifecycle management (CLM), and entity management systems.
• Comfort with ambiguity, rapid context-switching, and a builder mentality.