Commercial Counsel/Senior Counsel
San Francisco · New York City · 5+ years experience · Full-time · Hybrid · Posted Sep 14, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 5+ years experience
- Employment
- Full-time
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- San Francisco · New York City
About the role
- Perplexity is looking for a commercially minded attorney to join our Legal team.
- In this role, you'll own the full commercial legal lifecycle, drafting, negotiating, and closing a wide range of agreements across partnerships, procurement, infrastructure, and licensing.
- You will build scalable legal infrastructure and enable the business to move quickly without unacceptable risk.
Responsibilities
- Lead end-to-end drafting, review, and negotiation of commercial agreements, including MSAs, SaaS and API agreements, DPAs, partnership and reseller agreements, strategic collaboration and co-marketing agreements, procurement and vendor contracts, technology and infrastructure agreements, and IP licensing arrangements.
- Serve as a primary legal partner across the business, providing fast, practical, and business-aligned counsel that accelerates deal velocity without compromising on risk Management.
- Provide strategic counsel on legal risks across AI infrastructure, compute, partnerships, and enterprise deployments as the company scales.
- Advise on AI-specific legal considerations in commercial agreements, including acceptable use, data retention and training restrictions, output liability, and evolving regulatory requirements (e.g., EU AI Act, CCPA/CPRA, GDPR).
- Build and maintain scalable legal infrastructure—contract templates, negotiation playbooks, fallback positions, and tools (e.g., CLM, self-serve workflows)—to support high-volume deal flow and reduce friction in the contracting cycle.
- Partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Security, Finance, and Compliance teams to surface and address legal risk early, particularly on data use, enterprise integrations, and customer-specific compliance requirements.
- Monitor the evolving regulatory landscape for enterprise AI and SaaS products and translate emerging requirements into practical contractual and policy guidance for internal stakeholders.
Requirements
- JD and in good standing with an active U.S. state bar membership.
- At least 5+ years of law firm and/or in-house experience, with a track record of drafting and negotiating complex commercial technology agreements.
- Strong business acumen and ability to partner effectively with sales, product, engineering, and executive teams.
- Deep familiarity with data privacy and security frameworks (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, SOC 2, HIPAA) and experience negotiating DPAs and related compliance agreements.
- Ability to communicate clearly with business and technical audiences and effectively translate legal concepts for non-lawyers.
- Hands-on attitude to tackle projects large and small, low-ego approach to working across the organization.
- Positive collaborative attitude, comfort with ambiguity and a fast pace, high level of integrity, and intellectual curiosity about AI technology and how these products work.
- Comfortable working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
Preferred qualifications
- Prior experience with infrastructure agreements is strongly preferred, including compute procurement (e.g., GPU capacity and cloud/neocloud agreements, colocation, and related SLA and acceptance terms).
Skills
- MSAs
- SaaS And API Agreements
- DPAs
- EU AI Act
- CCPA/CPRA
- GDPR
- CLM
- SOC 2
- HIPAA
