Strategic Finance Lead - Compute

About the role

We are seeking a Strategic Finance Lead for our GPU compute fleet. In this role, you will be a key partner to our inference and infrastructure teams, providing financial expertise to optimize our compute investments and drive capacity decisions.

What you’ll 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, including capacity forecasts, cost driver analyses, and investment scenario modeling
• Develop deep expertise in GPU vendor contracts, pricing structures, and cost drivers, and surface optimization opportunities across the fleet
• Serve as subject matter expert for Perplexity's compute capacity plan, owning source of truth on utilization, committed-versus-consumed spend, and capacity by vendor and cluster
• Build internal token-cost curves distinguishing marginal from fully loaded serving cost, and translate them into internal and external token pricing
• Analyze the ROI of in-house inference and training, including opportunity cost across chip types, cluster configurations, and workloads, distilled into a framework for capacity deployment
• Partner closely with inference and infrastructure engineering to understand how serving and training workloads scale, and translate those technical dynamics into financial frameworks