Commercial Counsel

Perplexity Perplexity · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Legal

Commercial Counsel at an AI company, responsible for the full commercial legal lifecycle including drafting, negotiating, and closing agreements, building legal infrastructure, and advising on AI-specific legal questions and regulatory requirements. Requires experience with commercial technology agreements, data privacy, and security frameworks.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead end-to-end drafting, review, and negotiation of commercial agreements, including MSAs, SaaS and API agreements, DPAs, partnership and reseller agreements, strategic collaboration and co-marketing agreements, procurement and vendor contracts, technology and infrastructure agreements, and IP licensing arrangements.
  2. Serve as a primary legal partner across the business, providing fast, practical, and business-aligned counsel that accelerates deal velocity without compromising on risk management.
  3. Provide strategic counsel on legal risks across AI infrastructure, compute, partnerships, and enterprise deployments as the company scales.
  4. Advise on AI-specific legal considerations in commercial agreements, including acceptable use, data retention and training restrictions, output liability, and evolving regulatory requirements (e.g., EU AI Act, CCPA/CPRA, GDPR).
  5. Build and maintain scalable legal infrastructure—contract templates, negotiation playbooks, fallback positions, and tools (e.g., CLM, self-serve workflows)—to support high-volume deal flow and reduce friction in the contracting cycle.

Skills

Required

  • JD and active U.S. state bar membership
  • 5+ years of law firm and/or in-house experience
  • Drafting and negotiating complex commercial technology agreements
  • Data privacy and security frameworks (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, SOC 2, HIPAA)
  • Negotiating DPAs and related compliance agreements
  • Communicating clearly with business and technical audiences
  • Translating legal concepts for non-lawyers

Nice to have

  • Strong business acumen
  • Partner effectively with sales, product, engineering, and executive teams
  • Hands-on attitude
  • Low-ego approach
  • Positive collaborative attitude
  • Comfort with ambiguity and a fast pace
  • High level of integrity
  • Intellectual curiosity about AI technology

What the JD emphasized

  • AI-specific legal questions
  • AI-specific legal considerations
  • evolving regulatory requirements
  • data privacy and security frameworks
  • complex commercial technology agreements