Senior Commercial Counsel, Enterprise

About the Position

Perplexity is looking for a Senior Commercial Counsel, Enterprise to join our Legal team. We are seeking an independent, business-practical yet diligent-minded professional who can handle live deals, extend our existing infrastructure, and maintain stringent terms as deal volume, complexity, and regulatory challenges grow.

You will negotiate directly with large enterprise customers across various industries, including financial services, healthcare, government, and other regulated sectors. You will partner daily with Enterprise Sales, Partnerships, Deal Desk, Security, Privacy, Product, and Finance teams, and advise on the legal questions that arise with agentic, retrieval, and API products deployed in enterprise environments. This is a high-impact, hands-on role for a self-starter.

Responsibilities

• Independently lead end-to-end drafting, review, and negotiation of Enterprise customer agreements across our suite of offerings: Enterprise Pro, Enterprise Max, Computer, and API product lines, including MSAs, order forms, SaaS and API terms, DPAs, BAAs, security exhibits, customer-paper redlines, product-specific addenda, and public-sector vehicles such as GSA MAS orders and federal RFP responses.
• Serve as a trusted legal partner to Enterprise Sales, Partnerships, Deal Desk, and Customer Success, providing fast, practical, business-aligned counsel that accelerates deal velocity, protects critical terms, and scales as the Sales organization grows.
• Extend and maintain the existing Enterprise negotiation playbook, DPA and Privacy Notice architecture, product-specific term libraries, and fallback positions as our product surface, customer mix, and regulatory environment evolve.
• Advise on AI-specific contract terms for enterprise deployments, including bespoke data postures; negotiate output ownership and liability, agentic-feature risk allocation, and translate product operations into enterprise contract commitments.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Security, Privacy, Finance, and Compliance to surface and address legal risk early, particularly on customer-data flows, enterprise integrations, model routing, and customer-specific compliance requirements.
• Monitor the evolving regulatory landscape for enterprise AI, data protection, and public-sector procurement (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, HIPAA, DORA, EU AI Act, sector-specific frameworks) and translate emerging requirements into practical contractual positions and updated playbook guidance.
• Represent Perplexity Legal externally on customer negotiation calls with counterparty counsel at sophisticated enterprises.

Requirements

• JD and in good standing with an active U.S. state bar membership.
• At least 7+ years of combined law firm and in-house experience, with a substantial in-house component, and a demonstrated track record of independently owning complex enterprise SaaS or API deals from the vendor side, including work with regulated-industry customers (financial services, healthcare, or government).
• Experience advising on commercial terms and pricing structures for high-growth SaaS/API businesses, including usage-based and tiered pricing, pilots, and expansion frameworks.
• Familiarity with data protection and security frameworks (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, DORA, EU AI Act) and hands-on experience negotiating DPAs.
• Strong business acumen and the ability to partner effectively with Sales, Deal Desk, Product, Security, and executive stakeholders on live deals under time pressure.
• Proven ability to triage and progress multiple concurrent deals under tight timelines while maintaining rigorous diligence, clear risk assessment, and high-quality documentation.
• Demonstrated ability to build and extend durable legal infrastructure - playbooks, templates, precedent repositories, or self-serve tools.
• Ability to communicate clearly with business and technical audiences and to translate legal concepts into usable guidance for non-lawyers, including Sales and Deal Desk.
• Hands-on, can-do approach to tackle projects large and small, low-ego approach to working closely with the Director and across the organization, and judgment about when to escalate and when to close.
• Positive collaborative attitude, comfort with ambiguity and a fast pace, high level of integrity, and intellectual curiosity about AI technology.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience with public-sector contracting or with on-prem deployment structures.
• Experience with AI-native contracting questions related to agentic products.
• Experience with contracting with regulated entities (financial institutions or health care), especially in the EU/UK.

We Offer

• Compensation: $200K – $290K • Offers Equity
• Benefits: Full-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care accounts, and more. Full-time employees outside the U.S. enjoy a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region of residence.

About the Company

Perplexity is a leading company in the AI and technology sector, dedicated to providing innovative solutions and services. Our team is passionate about pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI, and we are committed to fostering a collaborative and inclusive work environment.