Legal and Operations Engineering Lead
Remote • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Perplexity is seeking a technical lead to join our legal operations team to drive infrastructure development 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.
Responsibilities
- Architect and build Perplexity's Legal and Operations Engineering platform, including agents, workflows, and evaluation infrastructure to automate legal work.
- Own the enterprise contracting automation system from 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, and reusable platform.
- Serve as the technical partner to the General Counsel, translating legal workflows into engineered systems and engineering constraints back to stakeholders.
- Evaluate, retire, or replace third-party tools with purpose-built internal systems.
- Act as a case study for forward-deployed engineering in non-engineering functions, creating a playbook for other departments.
Requirements
- 3+ years of backend software engineering experience with a track record of shipping production systems at scale.
- Working knowledge of legal concepts, with some experience in legal operations or paralegal work.
- Strong business judgment and practical problem-solving skills.
- Track record of building scalable processes and foundational systems from scratch.
- Fluency with modern legal tech and AI tools.
- Disciplined human-in-the-loop practices.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- 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.
- Prior experience at an AI-native, SaaS, or consumer technology company.
- Familiarity with e-billing platforms, matter management, CLM, and entity management systems.
- Comfort with ambiguity, rapid context-switching, and a builder mentality.