Perplexity
Strategic Finance Lead - AI
$190K–$240K
San Francisco · Hybrid · Full-time · Posted Sep 1, 2026
- Experience
- 4+ years in strategic finance, private equity, growth equity, consulting, or investment banking is listed as a preferred qualification.
About the job
Leads financial planning and product economics for AI offerings, modeling inference costs and margins to guide pricing, packaging, and model-deployment decisions.
What you'll do
- Lead budgeting, forecasting, and variance analysis for inference and model spend.
- Build product-margin models and maintain forecasts that reconcile revenue, serving costs, and gross margin using production data.
- Advise product, inference, and data teams on pricing, model costs, and unit economics.
What they ask for
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and financial-modeling abilities.
- Ability to communicate financial insights across functions, including to non-finance audiences.
- Commercial judgment on pricing, packaging, discounting, and growth-versus-margin tradeoffs.
- Track record partnering with technical and product teams to drive financial optimization.
Nice to have
- Experience in AI or LLM product financial management, including work with model providers or inference platforms.
- Experience with usage-based pricing, subscription economics, or model-serving economics.
Pay
$190K – $240K (base salary)
AI focus
Develops financial models and frameworks for AI-product unit economics, inference and model spend, serving costs, margins, and model deployment.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative