Strategic Finance Lead — Compute

Perplexity
San Francisco
Workplace: HybridFull timeUSD 190,000 - 215,000 annuallyFunction: Finance & AccountingExperience: 4+ yearsSkills: ["Analytical thinking","Problem-solving","Critical thinking","Attention to detail","Communication"]

Lead finance for Perplexity’s GPU compute fleet, partnering with inference and infrastructure teams to optimize compute investments and capacity decisions. Build bottoms-up models for utilization, cost drivers, and investment scenarios; analyze committed-versus-consumed spend; and develop token-cost curves that inform internal and external pricing. Translate technical scaling dynamics into clear financial frameworks and communicate capacity economics and ROI across vendors, clusters, and workloads.

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Perplexity
Perplexity
3 days ago

Strategic Finance Lead — Compute

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Job Summary

Lead finance for Perplexity’s GPU compute fleet, partnering with inference and infrastructure teams to optimize compute investments and capacity decisions. Build bottoms-up models for utilization, cost drivers, and investment scenarios; analyze committed-versus-consumed spend; and develop token-cost curves that inform internal and external pricing. Translate technical scaling dynamics into clear financial frameworks and communicate capacity economics and ROI across vendors, clusters, and workloads.
Location: San Francisco
Workplace: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Finance & Accounting

Key Responsibilities

  • •Own budgeting, monthly forecasting, variance analysis, and ongoing financial plan maintenance for GPU compute spend.
  • •Build and maintain bottoms-up financial models for the GPU fleet, including capacity forecasts, cost driver analyses, and investment scenario modeling.
  • •Serve as subject matter expert for the compute capacity plan, maintaining source-of-truth utilization and committed-versus-consumed spend by vendor and cluster.
  • •Develop internal token-cost curves (marginal vs fully loaded serving cost) and translate them into token pricing for internal and external stakeholders.
  • •Partner with inference and infrastructure engineering to understand how workloads scale and translate those dynamics into financial frameworks for capacity deployment.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 190,000 - 215,000 annually
Equity and Bonus:Equity

Key Requirements

  • •4+ years of experience in strategic finance, infrastructure investment, private equity/growth equity, consulting, or investment banking, preferably with infrastructure or datacenter experience.
  • •Experience in cloud or GPU infrastructure financial management, including direct work with major cloud providers or neoclouds.
  • •Direct experience with committed-use economics (reserved capacity, savings plans, committed-use discounts) and GPU procurement.
  • •Deep expertise in GPU vendor economics, contract structures, and pricing models.
  • •Proficiency with financial modeling tools and ability to translate complex contract and usage data into actionable frameworks.
Experience:4+ yearsInfrastructureDatacenterGPU infrastructureCloud computingAIML
Skills:Analytical thinkingProblem-solvingCritical thinkingAttention to detailCommunication

Company Brief

Perplexity
Perplexity AI provides an AI-powered answer engine that returns conversational, citation-backed answers to user queries and offers Pro/Enterprise products and APIs for research, knowledge work, and search augmentation.
Industry: AI & Machine Learning
Company Size: Medium (51 to 250 employees)
Revenue: USD 50M to 100M
Growth: Scaleup
Valuation: Unicorn (USD 1B+)
Funding: Series D
Headquarters: San Francisco, United States
Founded: 2022
Glassdoor
Glassdoor: 4.6
WebsiteLinkedInGlassdoor