AI Strategist, Legal

Perplexity; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 215,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is an AI-powered platform building an AI-driven workflow engine for the legal sector. The AI Strategist on the Applied AI team will own strategic customer engagements end to end—leading discovery, defining build scope, demonstrating frontier capabilities against real legal workflows, and driving deployments from first conversation through production and expansion.

You will sit with partners, associates, and counsel, translating their workflows into custom skills and connectors, while

Qualifications

• 3+ years of direct experience practicing law at a leading firm or in-house.
• 5+ years of total experience spanning legal and some combination of technical GTM, sales engineering, solutions architecture, AI product strategy, or applied AI with customer exposure.
• Deep fluency in legal workflows: research, contract review, diligence, drafting, discovery, regulatory analysis, and matter management.
• Strong intuition for AI products, agents, and workflows, with the ability to understand technical systems without needing every detail pre-digested.
• Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous customer problems into scoped, executable deployment plans with clear success metrics.
• Strong commercial instincts and comfort operating with partners, general counsel, CIOs, and heads of innovation.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to write proposals, customer memos, technical scopes, and launch narratives.
• High agency and low ego, with the ability to run multiple complex customer workstreams in parallel and make progress before the playbook exists

Responsibilities

• Own strategic legal engagements: lead discovery with law firms and in-house legal departments, define scope, and own success metrics.
• Be the demo and technical proof engine: build and deliver workflow-specific demos and prototype workflows hands-on.
• Bring domain judgment to the product: translate practice workflows into product and data-priority decisions.
• Operate as the commercial lead: manage senior relationships and drive engagements through qualification, scoping, pricing, and close

Skills

Legal tech familiarity

Communication skills

Problem solving

Job description

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine founded in December 2022 and growing rapidly as one of the world's leading AI platforms. Perplexity has raised over $1B in venture investment from some of the world's most visionary and successful leaders, including Elad Gil, Daniel Gross, Jeff Bezos, Accel, IVP, NEA, NVIDIA, Samsung, and many more. Our objective is to build accurate, trustworthy AI that powers decision-making for people and assistive AI wherever decisions are being made.

Throughout human history, change and innovation have always been driven by curious people. Today, curious people use Perplexity to answer more than 780 million queries every month—a number that's growing rapidly for one simple reason: everyone can be curious.

About The Role

Perplexity is building the AI platform for professional legal work: Perplexity Computer, our agentic platform that navigates tools, completes multi-step workflows, and connects to the case law, statutes, filings, contracts, and internal documents that legal professionals already rely on, and our API Platform, which powers search, retrieval, and automation across structured and unstructured legal data.

At the center of this is our Applied AI / Forward Deployed motion: we work closely with law firms and in-house legal teams to distill their core legal processes and embed them into bespoke solutions built on our platform. That means sitting with partners, associates, and counsel to understand how they research, review, draft, and advise, then translating those workflows into custom skills, agents, and connector configurations that run inside their daily process—and feeding what we learn back into the product so it compounds across customers.

As an AI Strategist on our Applied AI team focused on the legal vertical, you are the subject matter expert who makes this real for legal professionals. This is a commercial and sales engineering role: you will own strategic customer engagements end to end—leading discovery, defining what to build, demonstrating frontier capabilities against real legal workflows, and driving deployments from first conversation through production and expansion. You are part customer owner, part product strategist, part sales engineer—fluent in both the language of the practice group and the language of the platform.

Responsibilities

Own strategic legal engagements

• Lead discovery with law firms and in-house legal departments: what matters to the practice, what problems they are solving, and which workflows are worth automating
• Define scope—what is the right thing to build—and own success metrics, pilot design, and commercial structure
• Drive deployment and rollout across practice groups and legal departments, with real revenue responsibility alongside Sales

Be the demo and technical proof engine

• Build and deliver compelling, workflow-specific demonstrations: legal research, contract review and analysis, due diligence, drafting, deposition and discovery summarization, regulatory monitoring
• Prototype workflows, skills, and connector configurations hands-on in Perplexity Computer and the API Platform to prove value in the customer's own use cases
• Run pilots and evaluations that hold up to scrutiny from skeptical partners and general counsel

Bring domain judgment to the product

• Translate how practice groups, legal departments, and legal ops teams actually work into product, connector, and data-partnership priorities
• Assess whether we have the right research, contract, docket, and document-management integrations to serve each legal segment—and drive the roadmap where we do not
• Codify repeatable engagement patterns: discovery templates, practice-specific reference workflows, demo libraries, and deployment playbooks

Operate as the commercial lead

• Own senior relationships with partners, general counsel, and legal-innovation leaders; move engagements through qualification, scoping, proposal, pricing, legal, and close
• Create urgency, write crisp follow-ups, and know when to push and when to wait

Qualifications

• 3+ years of direct experience practicing law at a leading firm or in-house—litigation, transactional, or regulatory—or in legal ops / legal innovation with deep workflow exposure; you have run diligence, drafted and negotiated agreements, and lived the workflows you will now automate
• 5+ years of total experience spanning legal and some combination of technical GTM, sales engineering, solutions architecture, AI product strategy, or applied AI with customer exposure
• Deep fluency in legal workflows: research, contract review, diligence, drafting, discovery, regulatory analysis, and matter management
• Strong intuition for AI products, agents, and workflows, with the ability to understand technical systems without needing every detail pre-digested
• Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous customer problems into scoped, executable deployment plans with clear success metrics
• Strong commercial instincts and comfort operating with partners, general counsel, CIOs, and heads of innovation
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to write proposals, customer memos, technical scopes, and launch narratives
• High agency and low ego, with the ability to run multiple complex customer workstreams in parallel and make progress before the playbook exists

Nice-to-Haves

• JD and bar admission
• Hands‑on experience building with agentic systems, tool‑use workflows, MCP, or LLM APIs
• Working knowledge of legal technology platforms: Westlaw, LexisNexis, iManage, NetDocuments, Relativity, Ironclad, or similar
• Experience selling or deploying technology into law firms or regulated enterprises, including outside‑counsel guidelines, privilege, and security review
• Founder or early‑startup operating experience
• Strong network across AmLaw 100 firms and Fortune 500 legal departments

Compensation Range: $215K - $250K