Associate General Counsel - Commercial

Rocket Lab; United States; Remote; USD 220,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company in location technology is seeking a senior attorney to join its collaborative legal team. This role involves handling complex commercial and product law transactions, requiring 7+ years of experience and a technical background. The successful candidate will demonstrate excellent communication skills, a customer-centric negotiation style, and a willingness to engage with both commercial and technical teams in a remote environment.

Benefits

Equity in the company

Comprehensive benefits package

Flexible working environment

Qualifications

• 7+ years of practicing attorney experience, including 5+ years in-house at a tech company.
• Experience with APIs, SDKs, and complex sales deals.
• Strong drafting and communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Handle commercial transactions and product law issues with a focus on complex data in-licenses.
• Collaborate with the legal team to draft agreements tailored to customer use cases.
• Contribute to scaling the legal department and improving operational processes.

Skills

Excellent communication skills

Negotiation

Technical orientation

Education

JD degree from top-tier law school

Computer engineering, computer science or similar technical degree

Tools

APIs

SDKs

Job description

Mapbox is the leading real-time location platform for a new generation of location-aware businesses. Mapbox is the only platform that equips organizations with the full set of tools to power the navigation of people, packages, and vehicles everywhere. More than 3.5 million registered developers have chosen Mapbox because of the platform’s flexibility, security and privacy compliance. Organizations use Mapbox applications, data, SDKs and APIs to create customized and immersive experiences that delight their customers.

What You'll Do

We’re looking for a lawyer with 7 + years of practicing attorney experience to join our small and collaborative legal team. The right candidate will have worked at a technology company, be technically savvy and hard-working, keen to learn our products and business, and willing to dig into a wide variety of projects in a fast-paced environment. On the commercial side, this encompasses complex data in-licenses, as well as customer sales and automotive OEM deals. On the product side, this includes the full gamut of working with our product and engineering colleagues and our Lead Privacy Counsel to help bring products and features alive and to our customers!

This is a senior individual contributor role where you will come up with practical and creative solutions to get complex deals done and advance our business. Drafting and communication skills are extremely important. We believe that it is the role of in-house counsel to own the deal. Working with the GC and other legal team members, you will develop the ability to both mitigate and accept risk. We almost never say to our colleagues “that’s a business issue for you to decide.”

Mapbox’s customers use our SDKs and APIs to build their own location-aware applications. Our products are building blocks that our customers can use in various different ways, so our sales agreements are technically more complex than in an enterprise software or SaaS software company. We don’t believe that lawyers can give good legal advice in a vacuum, so you must be able to become very conversant with and draft agreements based on our specific customers’ use case and technical implementations. Therefore, a technical degree or equivalent experience is required. See below.

We are not processing hundreds of small sales deals with tweaks to the governing law clause. Instead, our data in-licenses and sales/OEM deals are complex and require a thoughtful approach by a senior lawyer. While we work closely together and thus teach and learn from each other every day, you will not have direct reports.

This is a combination of a senior commercial and product role. Some product lawyers don’t want to draft agreements and be in the fray with sales folks; some commercial lawyers aren’t interested in getting through the engineering speak to sort out what the engineers/product folks are trying to do and help them get it done. We’re looking for someone who is enthusiastic about and has the experience to do all of it!

We think it’s important to continually be improving operational processes/updating forms because this is how we can scale a small legal organization, supporting a fast-growing tech company. You need to share and participate in these efforts to scale our department and improve our services. Prior work in a pre-IPO company will be extremely helpful.

We are a flat organization, but we pitch in and help each other. You must be willing to roll up your sleeves and dive into a variety of legal issues, enjoy the give and take of collaboration and take feedback.

The breadth, variety and complexity of projects that you will handle at Mapbox is great training for cross-functional generalists who want to better understand and practically address business problems and risk.

What We Believe are Important Traits for This Role

• 7+ years of practicing attorney experience, with 2+ years at a top-tier law firm in any area and 5+ years in-house at a technology company in sales-side commercial transactions (not procurement or privacy/regulatory compliance).

• At least one of the following is required:

  1. Computer engineering, computer science or other similar technical degree.

  2. At least 2, but not more than 4, years experience in software patent litigation or patent prosecution at a top tier firm.

  3. Extensive experience working with APIs and SDKs.

• Extensive experience working on complex sales deals.

• Excellent communication skills. Your writing and verbal communications need to be clear and concise.

• A practical and customer-centric orientation and negotiation style. You understand (or will quickly learn) the business deal so you know what matters and what doesn't and will focus on practical resolutions to speed deals through the pipeline.

• A sense of humor. We take our work seriously, but we try not to take ourselves too seriously.

• The legal team is working entirely remotely. While we think candidates who live near technology hubs often have the best backgrounds, we will consider remote candidates who live anywhere in the US. We prefer candidates in the Pacific time zone.

• JD degree from top-tier law school and active membership in at least one US state bar.

• If your resume doesn’t clearly demonstrate the first two points above, you should include a cover note as to why you are interested in this role and why you think you would be a good fit despite not meeting those criteria. Resumes without a cover note in those circumstances will likely not be considered.

What We Value

Please read our core values, which are not unique to this position and are necessary for success by all Mapboxers.

By applying for this position, you acknowledge that you agree to the Mapbox Privacy Policy which is linked here. Completing this application requires you to provide personal data, such as your name and contact information, which is mandatory for Mapbox to process your application.

Mapbox participates in E-Verify to confirm employee work authorization. Please refer to the Notice of E-Verify Participation and Right to Work posters for more information.

The salary range for this position is $220,000-$300,000, depending on level, plus equity and benefits.

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