Legal Tech & Operations Engineering Lead

Perplexity; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Perplexity is seeking a dynamic technical lead for our Legal Operations team to drive infrastructure development and support our growth trajectory within a rapidly growing AI technology company.

This role reports to the Legal Operations Manager and partners with the General Counsel and VP, Operations to architect, deliver, and transform high-volume legal workflows into scalable automated systems. You’ll build foundational processes to scale with our growth.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of backend software engineering experience shipping production systems at scale.
• Working knowledge of legal concepts; experience in legal operations or paralegal work is desired.
• Strong business judgment and practical problem-solving; able to calibrate risk in real time.
• Track record building scalable processes and foundational systems from scratch, not maintaining a mature function.
• Fluency with modern legal tech and AI tools; disciplined human-in-the-loop practices.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to work with senior stakeholders.
• Entrepreneurial drive, curiosity, and agility in a fast-moving environment.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build Perplexity's Legal and Operations Engineering platform—a stack of agents, workflows, and evaluation infrastructure for high-volume legal work.
• Own the enterprise contracting automation system end-to-end.
• Ship in-product legal surfaces built on Perplexity and Computer itself.
• Consolidate ad-hoc legal bots, prompts, and scripts into a documented, observable platform with clear conventions.
• Translate complex legal workflows into engineered systems and explain constraints to non-technical stakeholders.
• Evaluate, retire, or replace third-party tools for internal systems advantages.
• Be a case study for forward-deployed engineering in non-engineering functions.

Skills

Backend engineering

Legal tech familiarity

Business judgement

Scalable processes

AI tools familiarity

Communication skills

Entrepreneurial drive

Tools

e-billing platforms (Brightflag)

matter management

CLM

entity management systems

Job description

Perplexity is seeking a dynamic technical lead for our Legal Operations team to drive infrastructure development and support our growth trajectory within a rapidly growing AI technology company.

This role reports to the Legal Operations Manager and partners with the General Counsel and VP, Operations to architect, deliver, and transform high-volume legal workflows into scalable automated systems. You’ll build foundational processes to scale with our growth.