Senior Commercial Counsel

Decagon Decagon · Vertical AI · San Francisco, CA · Legal

Senior Commercial Counsel for a conversational AI platform company, focusing on negotiating enterprise SaaS agreements, streamlining contract operations, and building scalable legal infrastructure. Requires experience with commercial agreements, legal frameworks (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA), AI governance, and balancing legal risk with business outcomes.

What you'd actually do

  1. Be a part of a team reviewing and negotiating our commercial agreements, working cross functionally to balance legal risk with business outcomes, tailoring your guidance based on context and deal stage.
  2. Build relationships throughout our company, and serve a solutions oriented partner to provide guidance to sales teams based on our technology, market norms, and your experience.
  3. Define what excellent looks like on a legal team in a hypergrowth startup - establish working norms and process to provide top-tier service.
  4. Work to design, update, and enforce policies and controls over Decagon’s contracting process.
  5. Grow with the team as Decagon scales, and be open to taking on new challenges outside of Commercial legal as appropriate.

Skills

Required

  • Qualified attorney with 4-8+ years of legal experience
  • Experience at a top-tier law firm and/or relevant in-house role
  • Drafting, negotiating, and closing commercial agreements (SaaS, MSAs, SOWs, NDAs, DPAs, partner/reseller deals)
  • Knowledge of legal frameworks (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA), security concepts, AI governance, and IP in SaaS
  • Ability to balance legal risk with business outcomes and tailor guidance
  • Cross-functional collaboration skills
  • Clear and effective communication, translating legal complexity for non-legal stakeholders
  • Flexibility, eagerness to learn, and comfort with ambiguity and fast growth

Nice to have

  • In-house legal experience at a high-growth SaaS or technology company
  • Process-building mindset and experience with CLM tools/Salesforce integrations
  • Experience leading customer-facing contract negotiations with enterprise clients, especially regulated customers (financial services, healthcare, SLED & FED)
  • Experience negotiating AI terms and articulating common issues
  • Experience building legal playbooks, clause libraries, and approval workflows
  • Experience training commercial teams on contract review, negotiation strategy, or compliance
  • Mentoring junior colleagues

What the JD emphasized

  • qualified attorney
  • 4 - 8+ years of legal experience
  • top-tier law firm
  • relevant in-house role
  • deep experience drafting, negotiating, and closing on a high volume of commercial agreements
  • SaaS, MSAs, SOWs, NDAs, DPAs, and partner/reseller deals
  • fluent in legal frameworks (like GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA), security concepts, AI governance, and intellectual property concerns that arise in SaaS transactions
  • balance legal risk with business outcomes
  • tailor guidance based on context and deal stage
  • Thrive in cross-functional environments
  • go-to legal resource for Sales, Finance, Product, and RevOps
  • build out a global contracting process
  • leave your ego at the door
  • communicate clearly and effectively
  • translating legal complexity and abstract risk into actionable guidance
  • counterparties
  • flexible, eager to learn and grow
  • energized by fast growth, ambiguity
  • opportunity to build scalable legal systems that drive velocity
  • in-house legal experience at a high-growth SaaS or technology company
  • process-building mindset
  • worked closely with RevOps or LegalOps on CLM tools and Salesforce integrations
  • negotiated AI terms with counterparties
  • articulate common issues with brevity
  • built and maintained legal playbooks, fallback clause libraries, and approval workflows
  • trained commercial teams on contract review, negotiation strategy, or compliance topics
  • mentor junior colleagues