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Perplexity AI is seeking a Strategic Finance Lead to own the financial strategy and unit economics of its AI products. This is a high-impact role at the intersection of finance and AI product strategy, requiring deep expertise in model serving costs, pricing optimization, and margin management.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead inference and model spend forecasting, budgeting, and variance analysis
- Build and maintain product-margin models across the portfolio, reconciling revenue, serving costs, and gross margin from production data
- Develop expertise in model provider contracts, pricing structures, and cost drivers; identify optimization opportunities across model routing and deployment
- Own source of truth on cost per request, margin by product tier, and customer-segment economics
- Forecast consolidated model costs, translating product roadmaps and model transitions into forward-looking spend and margin trajectories
- Analyze margin impact of pricing, packaging, and deployment decisions; develop frameworks for product and pricing strategy
- Partner with product, inference, and data engineering teams to understand usage and serving-cost scaling dynamics
Ideal candidates bring exceptional analytical skills, complex financial modeling expertise, and proven ability to synthesize data into compelling insights. You should have strong commercial judgment on pricing and packaging tradeoffs, comfort communicating complex financial information to non-finance audiences, and a bias toward action in fast-moving environments.
Preferred experience includes 4+ years in strategic finance, PE, growth equity, consulting, or investment banking (ideally with software or AI product exposure); direct experience with AI/LLM product financial management or model provider relationships; deep expertise in usage-based pricing and subscription economics; and understanding of model serving economics (latency, throughput, token usage impact on margins).
The role is based in San Francisco with hybrid work (2-3 days in-office per week).
About Perplexity AI
AI / Data / Infrastructure — AI answer engine and search product for consumers and enterprises.
