Commercial Counsel

Alembic; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Alembic is looking for a Commercial Counsel to own the end-to-end commercial contracting process in a fast‑growing tech environment. You will be the primary legal contact on deals, collaborating with Sales, Finance, Partnerships and Security.

You will build playbooks, templates and escalation paths to accelerate negotiations, structure partnerships, and oversee data protections in a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape.

Qualifications

• JD and active bar membership in at least one US state (CA preferred).
• 5–9 years in commercial and technology transactions, with substantial in‑house time at a high‑growth technology company.
• Track record negotiating enterprise SaaS and data agreements with Fortune 100 teams.
• Fluency in data protection and security contracting: GDPR, CCPA, DPAs, sub‑processor chains.

Responsibilities

• Own the enterprise deal desk. Lead negotiation of master agreements, order forms, DPAs, security exhibits and NDAs with Fortune 100 customers.
• Build the playbook. Create templates, fallback positions and escalation paths for sales self‑service.
• Paper the partnerships. Structure and negotiate reseller, co-sell, SI and strategic alliance agreements.
• Secure the stack. Serve as legal lead on infrastructure, compute, data licensing and vendor terms.
• Defend the data. Own data-protection and AI regulatory posture for security reviews.
• Support what's next. Partner with Head of Corporate Legal on financing and strategic transactions.

Skills

Commercial contracts

In-house experience

SaaS & data agreements

Negotiation

Executive communication

Education

Juris Doctor (JD) and Bar admission

Tools

CLM platforms

Job description

About Us

Alembic is the pioneering Causal AI platform. We help the world's largest enterprises move past correlation to prove what actually drives business outcomes - the question marketing and growth teams have never been able to answer with confidence. Fortune 100 companies including Nvidia, Delta Air Lines, and Mars use Alembic to make multimillion-dollar decisions on trusted, causal evidence.

We're backed by a $145M Series B from WndrCo (founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg), Jensen Huang, Joe Montana, Prysm Capital, and Accenture. Our models run on our own NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD built on Grace Blackwell infrastructure - one of the fastest private supercomputers in the world. (We've melted GPUs getting here.)

About the Role - Commercial Counsel

Legal at Alembic is not a review queue. Our Patent Attorney sits in the codebase with the scientists. Our Commercial Counsel sits in the room where deals get done - on both sides of the table.

We're looking for a Commercial Counsel to own Alembic's commercial contracting end to end. You'll report to our Head of Corporate Legal and be the person Sales, Finance, Partnerships, Security and Infrastructure come to when something needs to move.

If you want a defined slice of a twelve-lawyer department, this isn't it. If you want to build a commercial legal function at a Series B company and have it be visibly, unambiguously yours, keep reading.

What You'll Do

• Own the enterprise deal desk. Lead negotiation of master agreements, order forms, DPAs, security exhibits and NDAs with Fortune 100 customers and their procurement organizations. You're the single legal point of contact on every deal, and the reason deals close on time.

• Build the playbook. Create the templates, fallback positions and escalation paths that let Sales self-serve on standard terms - so Legal becomes a speed advantage rather than the last gate before signature.

• Paper the partnerships. Structure and negotiate reseller, co-sell, SI and strategic alliance agreements, including with partners who are also investors and customers.

• Secure the stack. Serve as legal lead on the infrastructure behind our causal engine - compute and capacity, colocation, hardware procurement, data licensing and the vendors who support it - and keep supplier terms aligned with the commitments we've already made to customers.

• Defend the data. Own the data-protection and AI-regulatory posture that enterprise security reviews live or die on: GDPR, CCPA, DPAs, sub-processor chains, and the emerging AI rules our customers are already asking about.

• Support what's next. Partner with the Head of Corporate Legal on financing and strategic transactions, and on the diligence and contract work that follows them.

What Will Help You Succeed

• A JD and active membership in good standing of at least one US state bar - California preferred, or eligible to register as in-house counsel here.

• 5-9 years in commercial and technology transactions, with substantial in-house time at a high-growth technology company. Big-law training plus an in-house tour is the classic shape.

• A track record negotiating enterprise SaaS and data agreements against Fortune 100 procurement and security teams - unsupervised, and without losing the deal.

• Real fluency in data protection and security contracting: GDPR, CCPA, DPAs, sub-processor chains, security addenda. Our platform runs on our customers' proprietary data. This is not a side issue here.

• Evidence you've built process, not just closed deals. We care more that you made a contracting motion faster than that you papered a famous transaction.

• A plain-spoken style. You can tell an AE what the risk actually is in two sentences, and tell an executive when the answer is no.

• Helpful, not required: compute, colocation, data centre or hardware procurement agreements; export controls; exposure to venture debt or equipment financing; selecting and rolling out a CLM.

The role is right for you if

• You've built a commercial legal function before - or you've watched someone else build one and have strong opinions about what they got wrong.

• You want proximity to the thing being sold. Our customers make eight- and nine-figure decisions on Alembic's output, and the contracts reflect exactly that.

Why You Might Be Excited About Alembic

• The whole motion is yours. Customer, partner, vendor and infrastructure paper in one seat, reporting straight to the Head of Corporate Legal. No queue, no six layers of review.

• Deals that genuinely matter. Fortune 100 companies including Nvidia, Delta Air Lines and Mars make multimillion-dollar decisions on our output. The agreements you negotiate carry real weight on both sides of the table.

• A category being created in front of you. Causal AI is new, and so are the contracting questions it raises - data rights, model outputs, attribution, what a vendor can responsibly warrant. You'll write first drafts the market hasn't seen yet.

• Infrastructure most lawyers never touch. We run our own NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD built on Grace Blackwell infrastructure - one of the fastest private supercomputers in the world. Someone has to paper the compute behind it.

• Series B momentum, real ownership. Meaningful equity at a Series B company that's raised $145M, with proven product-market fit and Fortune 100 traction.

Why You Might Not Be Excited

• If you want a defined lane inside a built-out legal department, this isn't it. You'll be drafting the template, choosing the CLM and running the deal, often in the same afternoon.

• You prefer inheriting process to defining it. Much of what this role needs simply doesn't exist yet.

• You prefer static over dynamic. We're onsite five days a week in SoMa, priorities shift with the business, and the scope of this seat will keep growing. We have real paying customers and a playbook for growth, and we still move at startup speed at Series B scale.