Strategic Finance Lead - Compute

The role

The Strategic Finance Lead will partner with inference and infrastructure teams to optimize compute investments and drive capacity decisions. You will develop expertise in AI compute economics and build models for capacity and make-versus-buy decisions.

What you will do

• Finance lead for GPU compute spend, including budgeting, monthly forecasting, variance analysis, and financial plan maintenance
• Build and maintain detailed bottoms-up financial models for the GPU fleet
• Develop expertise in GPU vendor contracts, pricing structures, and cost drivers
• Serve as subject matter expert for Perplexity's compute capacity plan
• Build internal token-cost curves and translate them into internal and external token pricing
• Analyze the ROI of in-house inference and training
• Partner with inference and infrastructure engineering to translate technical dynamics into financial frameworks

Required qualifications

• Exceptional analytical skills to develop complex financial operating models
• Extraordinary problem-solving and critical thinking abilities
• Attention to detail and patience for getting to the source of truth on complex data
• Comfort communicating complex financial information to non-finance audiences
• Proven track record of partnering with technical teams to drive financial optimization
• Bias toward action and experience driving operational outcomes under tight timelines
• Background in AI, ML, or high-performance, large-scale computing infrastructure, including data centers and cloud service providers

Nice to have

• 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 service 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
• Experience with chip architecture economics and optimization strategies
• Proficiency with financial modeling tools

About the company

Perplexity is seeking a Strategic Finance Lead for their GPU compute fleet.