Head of Agentic Legal

Searce Inc; Pune District; On-site; INR 600,000 - 1,100,000; Full time

Job summary

Searce Inc. in Pune seeks a senior Legal Engineer to price, structure, and manage enterprise contracts across borders. You own the paper—from pricing instrument to enforcement—building a scalable function with versioned clauses, agents, and playbooks.

Responsibilities include designing an outcome-based paper framework, clearing marketplace terms on CSP platforms, and maintaining a fast, human-reviewed paper process. Experience handling complex agreements in multiple jurisdictions is required.

Qualifications

• 12+ years, India-qualified, with personal ownership of US or UK enterprise commercial paper.
• Outside-Counsel command across jurisdictions (US, UK, India, etc.).
• Business-first track record with gainshare/at-risk contracts and scalable paper.

Responsibilities

• Price the value by structuring fixed, at-risk, and gainshare contracts as pricing instruments.
• Clear the marketplace on CSP platforms to enable revenue through procurement-free processes.
• Write the moat's legal layer including partnership deeds, vesting, and clawback mechanisms.
• Cut the cycle with NDA turnaround, MSAs, and SOWs delivered quickly.

Skills

P&L Fluency

Deal-Room Presence

Principal's Judgment

Buy vs Build Judgment

Function-Builder Instinct

AI-Native Legal Practice

Agentic Legal Stack Literacy

CLM & CRM Systems Fluency

Eval-Minded

Tools

Ironclad

Sirion

Icertis

Agiloft

Job description

What are we looking for

Legal here is a profit function, not a review desk - and you're the one who prices it that way. The paper prices value, wins faster, and protects the assets that compound: outcome contracts, partner paper, marketplace terms, IP architecture, and your own Locked numbers.

Solver? Absolutely. But not the usual kind.

Contracting, done right, isn't a defense function - it's how value gets priced, protected, and compounded. If you read a deal the way an architect reads a structure - where the risk sits, where the margin sits, and how to build paper that holds under both negotiation and audit - we want to connect.

• Principal, not custodian.
• Reads risk the way an engineer reads load-bearing steel.
• Builds the paper once, so it holds - not the paper you redraft every time someone pushes back.
• Comfortable being the last signature before something becomes real.
• Thinks in systems: this clause, this precedent, this margin, for years - not just this deal.

This Isn’t for Everyone.

But if you've ever redlined a contract and thought about the deal it should have been - not just the risk it should have avoided - we'd love to chat with you.

Your Mission: The Role

solving for better.

This firm sells outcome contracts - fixed, at-risk, and gainshare against verified numbers. It admits partners on profit points, lists products on CSP marketplaces, and deploys engineers into partner programs on tour terms. Every one of those is a contracting innovation, and each one either generates margin or blocks it. The paper is the pricing instrument. You own the paper.

You build the function from an empty seat: three people, live in six months, chartered like every other squad here - a Locked number, an eval discipline, agents as the workforce, humans on judgment. If your instinct is to steer an outcome fee back to time-and-materials, or to say no before you've priced the yes, this isn't your seat.

If you read a P&L as fluently as a clause, treat a term sheet as a pricing instrument, and don't lose energy in a hostile counterparty round - this is your seat at the table.

Your Responsibilities

what you will wake up to solve.

Price the Value

• Own the Outcome Paper: Structure fixed, at-risk, and gainshare contracts against verified numbers - every clause a pricing instrument, not boilerplate. Gainshare converts delivery excellence into revenue that hourly paper never captures.
• Clear the Marketplace: Get listing terms cleared on both CSP marketplaces so commit-burn purchasing becomes procurement-free revenue. Paper that isn't cleared is revenue that doesn't exist.
• Write the Moat's Legal Layer: Partnership deeds, vesting, and clawback mechanics validated across India, the US, the UK, and Singapore; an IP and two-brand trademark architecture that protects the patterns and agents that compound.
• Cut the Cycle: Every day removed from paper cycles is pipeline conversion. NDA turnaround under 24 hours; MSA and SOW under 5 days - by month 6.

Build the Agentic Function

• Agents Draft First, Always: Stand up drafting agents grounded in a versioned clause library so no contract starts from a blank page; humans redline and decide. 80% of routine paper agent-first-drafted by month 6.
• Playbooks as Code: Codify negotiation positions, fallback ladders, and escalation thresholds per contract type. Review agents enforce them; only deviations reach a human.
• Run the Eval Harness: A gold-standard contract set with known issues; every agent measured on catch rate and false-positive rate per clause type before deployment and on every model refresh. Legal is not exempt from evaluation.
• Hire Above Your Own Bar: Hire the talent required to achieve the function's objectives - a three-person team, not a growing headcount. Make self-serve standard paper cover 50% of requests so hiring above the bar, not adding more of it, is how you scale.

Hold the Judgment Line

• Human-Only Gates, Non-Negotiable: Signatures, novel structures, regulatory filings, disputes, and anything touching the verification instrument or partner admission stay with you. Zero agent-drafted paper is signed without human review.
• Zero Ambiguity Restatements: No verified-number restatement is ever traceable to contract ambiguity. The paper is precise enough that the number holds.
• Buy Depth, Don't Hire It: Run outside counsel across the US, UK, Singapore, and the Middle East as an elastic layer, bought per matter and managed against a spend-per-matter number - down 40% against the month-1 baseline.

Report a Number, Not a Cost Line

• Legal's Own Ledger: Report a revenue-enabled number to the Betting Table - contract-cycle days removed from pursuits, gainshare clauses executed, marketplace revenue unlocked - not only a spend line.
• Own Every Locked Number: You are accountable for each target above and for the human-only gates. Not the team. You.

The DNA of a 'Searcian'

superpowers we value.

The 'happier' core

• happier-at-heart: humble, adaptable, positive, passionate, innovative, excellence-minded, responsible.
• happier-in-action: Not just a poster on the wall; It's how we make decisions, treat each other, show up for clients & hire or promote people.
• Thinks like a founder. Acts like an owner.
• Always in Beta: Relentless curiosity. Openness to learn, un-learn, and re-learn.
• Real Optimist: Views all setbacks as opportunities.
• Believes in truth over comfort. Ideas over titles. Learning over knowing.
• Embraces chaos with calm. Evolves faster than the market.

The 'evlos' mindset

This is the "how" behind your work. It's a deep seated drive to improve, discover, and own.

• Solver-core: Problem-solving is not just a default setting for a Searcian, it is our genuine passion and makes 'our eyes light up'. We actually solve problems to unwind & relax.
• Real improver: Searcians are built to push for better, not just settle for done. Real solvers Iterate to become better everyday and remain self-driven.
• Under-promise & over-deliver. We love to create pleasant surprises.
• Authentically original thinking: Asks the "why" that unlocks what's next. Brings unique, valuable perspectives to every discussion.
• Built-to-last + engineered-to-scale: We don't lead with tools. We lead with foundations. Process-first, AI-second.
• Super-Learner: Learns faster, adapts smarter, levels up relentlessly. What you can do tomorrow matters more to us than what you did yesterday. Your learning curve beats experience.

Functional Skills

• P&L Fluency: Reads a P&L and models gainshare economics live - treats a contract as a pricing instrument, not a risk register.
• Deal-Room Presence: Holds the room with Partners, CSP sellers, and clients through a collapsed structure or a hostile round. Energy is a working tool here, not a personality note.
• Principal's Judgment: Thinks like an owner of the business, not a service provider to it - knows which risks are worth carrying for margin.
• Buy vs. Build Judgment: Knows when jurisdictional depth is worth buying per matter versus building in-house - a capital-allocation call, not a staffing default.
• Function-Builder Instinct: Designs a legal function as a system - clause library, playbooks, agents, people - not as a headcount request.
• AI-Native Legal Practice: Uses LLMs in your own legal workflow today - drafting, review, research - with an explicit quality-control method, not just a prompt habit.
• Agentic Legal Stack Literacy: Understands drafting agents, review agents, versioned clause libraries, and eval harnesses well enough to specify what the Legal Engineer builds and judge whether it's working.
• CLM & CRM Systems Fluency: Has run contract lifecycle on enterprise CLM tooling (Ironclad, Sirion, Icertis, Agiloft, or equivalent) integrated with a CRM - knows what routing, attribution, and audit trail look like in software.
• Eval-Minded: Treats catch rate and false-positive rate as the language for whether legal automation is trustworthy. Evaluation, not vibes.

Experience & Relevance

• 12+ years, India-qualified, with personal ownership of US or UK enterprise commercial paper.
• Outside-Counsel Command: Has run outside counsel across three or more jurisdictions.
• Business-First Record: Has structured outcome-based, gainshare, or at-risk commercial paper - not just reviewed it. A business background or business-family exposure is preferred.

Bonus Points (you will thrive if you have)

• The "Founder" Bias: You've built a function, team, or practice from zero - not inherited one already running.
• Cross-Domain Judgment: You've applied your expertise somewhere outside your formal training - a deal, a structure, a risk call outside the textbook.
• Startup Grit: You've worn multiple hats in a resource-constrained environment and solved "0→1" problems.
• Public Voice: You've written, spoken, or taught publicly in your domain - not just practiced it privately.