Strategic Transactions & Partnerships Counsel

Wwshemi; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 380,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive salary

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Fireworks AI is seeking a Strategic Transactions & Partnerships Counsel to join our growing legal team. You will structure and negotiate complex commercial agreements across procurement, partnerships, and licensing for enterprise AI products, reporting to the General Counsel.

The role requires 9+ years of experience in sophisticated deals, a JD and active US state bar, and a hands-on approach to align deal strategy with business goals.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of relevant experience in complex commercial transactions.
• JD and US state bar membership.
• Experience leading procurement, partnerships, and licensing deals.
• Familiarity with the AI ecosystem and related legal issues.
• Ability to navigate ambiguous, high-stakes deals.

Responsibilities

• Negotiate and structure complex commercial agreements.
• Lead first-of-their-kind deals without templates.
• Partner with executives to align deal strategy with business objectives.
• Advise on commercial implications of AI landscape.
• Build transactional infrastructure and playbooks.

Skills

Negotiation

Contracting

Strategic partnerships

Executive presence

AI landscape

Education

Juris Doctor (JD)

Job description

About Us:

Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that's building the future of enterprise AI.

About the Legal team

We're building the infrastructure that democratizes access to intelligence. By serving state-of-the-art models to enterprises and advancing open source, we enable organizations to truly own their own intelligence. Our legal team exists to make that mission possible, responsibly and at scale, because we believe broad access to AI is one of the most consequential things we can build for society. Our legal team is defined by high integrity, high character, and high trust. We're low-ego, collaborative, kind, and supportive people who are genuinely excited to be part of a team. We win together or not at all.

About the role

As Strategic Transactions & Partnerships Counsel, you'll be a foundational member of a growing legal team, leading our most complex and consequential commercial deals. You'll operate at the intersection of large-scale procurement, strategic commercial partnerships, and model licensing - structuring and negotiating novel, high-stakes agreements that shape the trajectory of the business. This is a role for someone who thrives in legally unsettled territory and understands the AI ecosystem from the inside. This role initially reports to the General Counsel.

What you'll do.

• Negotiate and structure complex agreements, including commercial transactions, strategic partnerships, large-scale compute procurement, and licensing arrangements.
• Serve as the legal architect on first-of-their-kind deals where there's no template to work from.
• Partner directly with executive stakeholders to align deal strategy with business objectives.
• Advise on the commercial and strategic implications of the evolving AI landscape.
• Help build the transactional infrastructure and playbooks a scaling legal function needs.

Minimum Qualifications

• 9+ years of relevant experience, with significant complex commercial transactional work, ideally spanning law firm and in-house. Experience in hypergrowth environments preferred.
• A JD and membership in at least one US state bar.
• Demonstrated experience leading sophisticated deals - procurement, partnerships, licensing - independently and end-to-end.
• Deep familiarity with the AI ecosystem and the novel legal questions it raises.
• Strong executive presence and the judgment to navigate ambiguity with confidence.
• AI-forward, builder’s mindset, with a demonstrated ability to use AI tools to streamline daily workflows and accelerate efficiency.

Total compensation for this role also includes meaningful equity in a fast-growing startup, along with a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package. Base salary is determined by a range of factors including individual qualifications, experience, skills, market data, and work location.

Fireworks AI is an equal-opportunity employer.

Why Fireworks?

• Solve Hard Problems: Tackle challenges at the forefront of AI infrastructure, from low-latency inference to scalable model serving.
• Build What’s Next: Work with bleeding-edge technology that impacts how businesses and developers harness AI globally.
• Ownership & Impact: Join a fast-growing, passionate team where your work directly shapes the future of AI-no bureaucracy, just results.
• Learn from the Best: Collaborate with world-class engineers and AI researchers who thrive on curiosity and innovation.

Fireworks AI is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all innovators.