Associate Corporate Counsel

Paraform; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Paraform is hiring an Associate Corporate Counsel, our first Legal hire, to partner across teams as we scale a high-growth technology marketplace. You’ll draft and negotiate commercial agreements, advise on product, privacy, and employment matters, and help build scalable legal processes that support rapid growth.

You will navigate complex regulatory questions for marketplace operations and work closely with executives on strategic transactions and governance as the company expands.

Qualifications

• Active U.S. bar membership and eligibility to practice as in-house counsel in California.
• 4+ years of relevant legal experience advising technology or high-growth companies.
• Experience advising marketplace, platform, or recruiting businesses, including related regulatory issues.
• Strong drafting and negotiating experience for customer, vendor, partnership, and other business agreements.
• Ability to work across corporate, commercial, employment, product, privacy, and emerging issues.
• Strong business judgment with risk assessment and practical guidance.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment and building processes from scratch.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

Responsibilities

• Commercial: Draft, review, and negotiate customer, vendor, partnership, and other commercial agreements; help develop scalable contracting processes and templates.
• Product & Marketplace: Partner with Product and Operations on new products, marketplace policies, recruiter/customer relationships, and evolving legal questions.
• Employment: Support People team on employment matters, including performance management, terminations, compensation, policies, and employee relations.
• Corporate: Support financings, equity matters, corporate governance, board matters, and other strategic transactions.
• Privacy & Compliance: Support privacy, data protection, security, and broader compliance programs as Paraform scales.
• Legal Operations: Build repeatable legal processes, templates, playbooks, and systems to move faster with controlled risk.
• Business Partnership: Translate complex legal issues into practical guidance for stakeholders across the company.

Skills

Bar admission

In-house experience

Commercial contracting

Cross-functional collaboration

Risk assessment

Communication

Process building

Education

J.D. or equivalent

Bar admission (CA preferred)

Job description

About The Role:

We're looking for a highly pragmatic, business-minded Associate Corporate Counsel to join Paraform's growing team and serve as our first Legal hire. You'll partner with teams across the company, helping us navigate the increasingly complex legal questions that come with scaling a high-growth technology company and marketplace.

This is a broad, hands-on role. You'll move between negotiating commercial agreements, advising on marketplace and employment issues, partnering with Product on new features, supporting corporate matters, and helping build the legal processes and infrastructure that allow the business to scale.

We're looking for someone comfortable operating with ambiguity, who can balance risk with business needs, exercise strong judgment, and help find practical paths forward.

What You’ll Do

• Commercial: Draft, review, and negotiate customer, vendor, partnership, and other commercial agreements; help develop scalable contracting processes and templates.

• Product & Marketplace: Partner with Product and Operations on new products, marketplace policies, recruiter/customer relationships, and evolving legal and regulatory questions.

• Employment: Support the People team on employment matters, including performance management, terminations, compensation, policies, and employee relations.

• Corporate: Support financings, equity matters, corporate governance, board matters, and other strategic transactions.

• Privacy & Compliance: Support practical privacy, data protection, security, and broader compliance programs as Paraform scales.

• Legal Operations: Help build repeatable legal processes, templates, playbooks, and systems that allow the company to move faster without introducing unnecessary risk.

• Business Partnership: Translate complex legal issues into clear, practical guidance and recommendations for stakeholders across the company.

Required

• Active U.S. bar membership and eligibility to practice as in-house counsel in California.

• 4+ years of relevant legal experience, including experience advising technology or high-growth companies.

• Experience advising marketplace, platform, or recruiting/staffing businesses, including legal and regulatory issues related to marketplace operations, worker classification, and customer/provider relationships.

• Strong commercial experience, including drafting and negotiating customer, vendor, partnership, and other business agreements.

• Ability to work across a broad range of legal matters, including corporate, commercial, employment, product, privacy, and emerging issues.

• Strong business judgment with the ability to assess risk and provide practical, actionable guidance.

• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment and helping build processes from 01.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred

• Combination of law firm and in-house experience, particularly at a startup or high-growth technology company.

• Experience with employment law, including performance management, terminations, compensation, policies, and employee relations.

• Experience partnering with Product and Engineering on privacy, data protection, AI, and product counseling.

• Experience supporting financings, equity, corporate governance, board matters, or M&A.

• Experience helping build legal infrastructure, including templates, playbooks, contracting workflows, and compliance programs.

• Experience managing outside counsel to get to the right outcomes in a cost-effective manner.

• Experience using & experimenting with AI tools in daily workflows.

About Paraform:

Paraform is a marketplace modernizing one of the largest and most fragmented markets in the world: hiring. We partner with industry leaders like Decagon, Palantir, Rippling, Abridge, and Hightouch to hire world-class talent, and are growing quickly - 8x-ing revenue last year.

Paraform is the first end-to-end AI recruiting marketplace that connects companies with thousands of specialized recruiters and AI agents that work together to fill roles faster and more accurately.

Our mission is to make hiring fast, reliable, and scalable for every company in the world.

At Paraform, we believe recruiting works best when the right people are working on the right problems, combining human judgment with AI that truly understands hiring. That's why we're building a new foundation for how companies hire, bringing together specialized recruiters and modern AI tools.

We treat recruiters like entrepreneurs, not vendors – and we're building the financial, operational, and technical infrastructure that powers their success.

We are backed by the best investors and technology leaders: Scale, Felicis, A*, BOND, Liquid 2, DST Global, the founders of YouTube, Instacart, Canva, and more.