Director, Commercial Legal (enterprise)

Perplexity Perplexity · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Legal

Legal counsel for an AI company, focusing on commercial agreements for enterprise and API customers. Responsibilities include negotiating contracts, advising on AI-specific legal issues, and building legal infrastructure. Requires strong experience in SaaS/API agreements, data privacy, and risk management.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead end-to-end drafting, review, and negotiation of commercial agreements for Perplexity Enterprise Pro and API customers, including MSAs, Order Forms, SaaS subscription agreements, API terms, DPAs, BAAs, and NDAs with the experience to own deals from initial redline to signature.
  2. Serve as the primary legal partner to enterprise sales and GTM teams, providing fast, practical, and business-aligned counsel that accelerates deal velocity without compromising on risk management.
  3. Advance Perplexity's compliance and data security contracting posture including negotiating data processing agreements, security addenda, and responding to customer security and compliance questionnaires in close partnership with the Security and Privacy teams.
  4. Advise on AI-specific legal considerations embedded in enterprise and API agreements, including acceptable use, data retention and training restrictions, output liability, and evolving regulatory requirements (e.g., EU AI Act, CCPA/CPRA, GDPR).
  5. Build and maintain scalable legal infrastructure including contract templates, negotiation playbooks, and fallback positions to support high-volume enterprise deal flow and reduce friction in the sales cycle.

Skills

Required

  • JD and in good standing with an active US state bar membership
  • At least 10+ years of law firm and/or in-house experience
  • Track record of drafting and negotiating enterprise sales and SaaS agreements
  • Strong business acumen and ability to partner with business and technical teams
  • An 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 change and a fast pace, high level of integrity, and intellectual curiosity
  • Comfortable working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment

What the JD emphasized

  • AI-specific legal questions
  • AI-specific legal considerations