Strategic Finance Lead (GPU Compute)

Location: San Francisco, hybrid; in-person attendance required 2–3 days per week. The role is based in the U.S.; international employees receive region-specific benefits and international salaries are set according to the local market.

Salary: $190K–$240K USD annually, plus equity. The stated USD range applies only to U.S.-based positions.

Company

Perplexity develops AI-powered products and operates inference and infrastructure systems supported by GPU compute.

What you will do

• Lead budgeting, monthly forecasting, variance analysis, and financial plan maintenance for GPU compute spend.
• Build bottoms-up GPU fleet models covering capacity forecasts, cost drivers, and investment scenarios.
• Analyze GPU vendor contracts, pricing structures, committed-versus-consumed spend, utilization, and capacity by vendor and cluster.
• Develop token-cost curves distinguishing marginal and fully loaded serving costs and translate them into internal and external token pricing.
• Evaluate the ROI of in-house inference and training across chip types, cluster configurations, workloads, and opportunity costs.
• Partner with inference and infrastructure engineering to translate serving and training dynamics into financial frameworks and capacity decisions.

Requirements

• Exceptional analytical, problem-solving, and critical-thinking skills, including the ability to synthesize data into insights and develop complex financial operating models.
• Attention to detail and patience for establishing the source of truth across complex contract and usage data.
• Ability to communicate complex financial information to engineering leads, vendor counterparts, and other non-finance audiences.
• Proven experience partnering with technical teams to drive financial optimization initiatives and influence roadmap and resourcing decisions.
• Bias toward action, strong work ethic, 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.
• 4+ years of experience in strategic finance, infrastructure investment, private equity, growth equity, consulting, or investment banking, preferably with infrastructure or data center 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, including 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.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work with in-person attendance in San Francisco 2–3 days per week.
• U.S. full-time benefits include equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter, and dependent care accounts.
• International full-time employees receive benefits tailored to their region of residence.