Founding Legal Counsel

Build AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Dental benefits

Vision benefits

Housing subsidy

Relocation support

Wellness benefits

Daily lunch in office

Unlimited compute budget

Job summary

Build AI is seeking a Founding Legal Counsel to own the global legal architecture for its operations, reporting to the COO as the first in-house lawyer. You will design consent, data-transfer, entity, and contracting frameworks across multiple countries, and manage outside counsel networks while partnering with operations, finance, and engineering to scale the business.

You will handle complex privacy regimes, cross-border data flows, and international regulatory matters, owning relationships

Qualifications

• JD and active bar admission in at least one US jurisdiction.
• Significant in-house experience at a startup or fast-growing tech company.
• Deep practical data privacy knowledge: consent architecture and cross-border transfers.
• Strong contracting track record—drafting and negotiating complex agreements.
• Experience selecting and managing outside counsel across jurisdictions.

Responsibilities

• Own legal path into new countries, including entities, EORs, contractors, partners, payments, and local regulatory requirements.
• Build and own the global consent, privacy, data-transfer, retention, and data-provenance framework.
• Draft and negotiate customer, partner, vendor, manufacturing, employment, consulting, and other commercial agreements.
• Own international entity governance, maintenance, statutory obligations, intercompany arrangements, and compliance calendars.
• Identify and manage regulatory risk across privacy, AI/data, foreign investment, payments, and international operations.
• Run diligence on data rights and provenance for customers, regulators, investors, and acquirers.
• Select and manage outside counsel globally, including scope and fees, and translate advice into action.
• Partner with Operations, Data Scaling, Finance, Engineering to structure new markets, products, and operating models.
• Provide clear recommendations to enable rapid business decisions without unnecessary risk.

Skills

In-house startup experience

Data privacy

Commercial contracts

Outside counsel management

Regulatory acumen

Travel readiness

Fast-moving environment

Education

JD and bar admission

Job description

About Build AI

Build AI is the data hyperscaler for Physical AI. We're vertically integrated across hardware, manufacturing, logistics, collection, and model training to scale the physical labor dataset orders of magnitude faster than anyone in the world.

Job Summary

We're hiring a Founding Legal Counsel to own the legal architecture behind Build's global operations. The role reports to the Chief Operating Officer and is Build's first in-house legal hire.

Build designs and manufactures its own hardware, collects data inside working factories and job sites across a growing number of countries, and pays a distributed network of partners and individual collectors at volume. Every new country brings the same stack of questions at once: how fast we can operate before we need an entity, what consent has to look like for the people we record, whether the data can leave the country and on what paper, how collectors and partners are structured, and how they get paid without the banks shutting us down. Today those questions are answered country by country, by outside counsel across several firms, with no one inside the company owning the design.

You will own that design. You will build the consent, data-transfer, entity, and contracting architecture that has to work in twenty countries rather than be rebuilt in each one, run the outside counsel network instead of being routed by it, and paper the commercial agreements on both sides of the business — the partners who collect the data and the customers who license it.

Securities and financing, export controls, national security, tax, and jurisdiction-specific regulatory matters will continue to sit with outside specialist counsel. You will own those relationships and translate that advice into action rather than being the specialist yourself.

You will be hands-on from day one, you will do most of the work yourself before you hire anyone — leveraging AI seamlessly and exhaustively — and you will build the legal infrastructure while the company grows from a founding team to thousands across multiple continents.

Your job is to help Build move quickly without taking risks we don't understand.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the legal path into new countries, including entities, EORs, contractors, partners, payments, and local regulatory requirements
• Build and own the global consent, privacy, data-transfer, retention, and data-provenance framework
• Draft and negotiate customer, partner, vendor, manufacturing, employment, consulting, and other commercial agreements
• Own international entity governance, maintenance, statutory obligations, intercompany arrangements, and compliance calendars
• Identify and manage regulatory risk across privacy, AI/data, foreign investment, payments, foreign ownership, and international operations
• Run diligence on Build's data rights and provenance for customers, regulators, investors, and acquirers
• Select and manage outside counsel globally, including scope, fees, quality, and translating specialist advice into action
• Partner with Operations, Data Scaling, Finance, Engineering, and Manufacturing to structure new markets, products, and operating models
• Make risk legible and give clear recommendations that help the business move quickly without taking risks it doesn't understand

You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)

• JD and active bar admission in at least one US jurisdiction, with 6+ years of relevant experience including significant in-house time at a startup or rapidly growing technology company
• Owned legal work for a company operating across multiple countries — you have stood up operations in markets you had not worked in before, and dealt with what went wrong after launch
• Deep, practical data privacy experience: consent architecture, cross-border transfer, and the ability to work with a regime you have not read before and reach an answer that holds
• Strong commercial contracting experience — you have personally drafted and negotiated complex agreements on both the customer and partner/vendor side
• Have selected and managed outside counsel across multiple jurisdictions, including pushing back on scope and fees
• Comfortable being the entire department before you are the head of one, and comfortable giving a clear recommendation under time pressure with incomplete information
• Willing to be in San Francisco in person, and to get on a plane to Shenzhen, India, or any market we are opening when the answer is on the ground

Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)

• Legal operations in China, India, Southeast Asia, LATAM, or Africa
• AI, data licensing, or another business where the product is data and provenance is the asset
• Contractor and worker classification at scale across multiple jurisdictions
• Marketplace, gig, or distributed-workforce platforms operating across countries
• Biometric, video, or other sensitive-data privacy regimes
• Hardware, robotics, or a business that moves its own devices across borders — customs, import/export, and device compliance
• Corporate governance for a venture-backed US company with foreign subsidiaries, including entity maintenance and investor or M&A diligence
• Working alongside export controls, trade, national security, securities, and financing counsel without needing to be the specialist

Benefits

• Competitive pay

• Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage

• $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits

• Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office

• Relocation support for those moving to San Francisco (Financial District) or Shenzhen (Nanshan)

• Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more

• Daily lunch and dinner in our office

• Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

• Unlimited Codex and Claude credits

• Travel

How we're different

Build believes in the Bitter Lesson. By taking a general approach of learning from humans, our addressable market is all physical labor.

We are a fully in-person team in San Francisco (Financial District) and Shenzhen (Nanshan), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.

Build AI is an equal opportunity employer.