# Legal and Operations Engineering Lead

**Company:** [Perplexity](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/perplexity)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, Palo Alto, CA
**Role:** Fullstack Engineering
**Salary:** $150k – $250k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** backend engineering, AI, legal technology, Workflow Automation, contract lifecycle management, e-billing, matter management, entity management, human-in-the-loop, production systems
**Posted:** 2026-08-03

> Build and lead scalable legal and operations automation systems, translating complex legal workflows into production software and AI-enabled tools. The role requires 7+ years of backend engineering experience, strong business judgment, and familiarity with legal operations or legal technology.

## Job Description

## 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.

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