Strategic Finance Lead (Artificial Intelligence)

Join Perplexity, a leading AI company, as a Strategic Finance Lead. In this high-impact role, you will be responsible for optimizing the economics of our AI products, driving pricing and margin decisions, and building financial frameworks from scratch. You will work closely with product, inference, and data teams, and have a deep understanding of unit economics, model provider contracts, and cost drivers. This position requires exceptional analytical skills, a strong work ethic, and experience in strategic finance or AI product management.

• Develop deep expertise in the unit economics of AI products, build models that inform pricing and packaging decisions.
• Lead the budgeting, forecasting, and variance analysis for inference and model spend, and maintain financial plans.
• Partner closely with product, inference, and data engineering teams to understand usage and serving cost dynamics.

• Sound commercial judgment across pricing, packaging, discounting, and the tradeoffs between growth and margin
• Attention to detail and patience for getting to the source of truth on complex and interconnected usage, revenue, and cost data
• Background in AI, ML, or consumption-based business models with complex cost structures
• Exceptional analytical skills with an ability to synthesize data into compelling insights and develop complex financial operating models
• A bias toward action, strong work ethic, and experience driving operational outcomes under tight timelines
• Comfort working cross-functionally and are adept at communicating complex financial information to non-finance audiences
• A proven track record of partnering with technical and product teams to drive financial optimization initiatives
• Extraordinary problem-solving and critical thinking abilities to develop new frameworks for assessing product margin and unit economics in a rapidly evolving industry
• 4+ years of experience in strategic finance, private equity, growth equity, consulting, or investment banking, preferably with software or AI product experience
• Deep expertise in usage-based pricing, subscription economics, and gross-margin and COGS attribution by customer and model family
• Experience in AI or LLM product financial management, including direct work with model providers or inference platforms
• Proficiency with financial modeling tools
• Experience with model serving economics, including how latency, throughput, and token usage flow through to margin performance