Senior Legal Counsel

About the company

Our client is a small artificial intelligence company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Lead the legal side of a small, research-driven team by setting priorities for applied legal research and working alongside engineers and scientists. The role combines hands-on legal analysis and scholarly writing with building a legal function from the ground up. It suits an experienced attorney who enjoys producing published work and solving technical problems.

What you'll do

• Decide which areas of law, jurisdictions and scenarios the team examines first.

• Develop realistic, multi-step scenarios with technical colleagues and take responsibility for the quality of the core datasets.

• Publish scholarly papers and engage with external legal scholars and academic advisors.

• Turn research findings into practical guidance for improving model training and pre-deployment testing.

• Recruit and manage legal annotators and lawyers as the team grows.

• Build the legal function, coordinating outside counsel where it makes sense.

• Requirements

• What we're looking for

• Seven or more years of legal experience, with real experience actively practicing law.

• Specialist depth in one field of law, such as injury litigation or technology regulation, with a background in product liability or tort matters especially valued.

• Currently licensed to practice law in a US state.

• A law degree from an American law school.

• A record of producing legal analysis in print, whether scholarship, court filings or written decisions.

• Genuine interest in AI and comfort working closely with machine learning researchers and engineers on technical problems.

• A startup mindset: enjoys building from zero and owning both research and day-to-day legal work.

• Willingness to work high-velocity hours beyond a standard 9-to-5, including weekends.

• Bonus points

• Admission to the California bar.

• Prior work on legal data, labeling projects or natural language tools for law.

• Hands-on familiarity with artificial intelligence, gained at a technology startup or in litigation involving AI.

• Experience leading or hiring a group of attorneys.

• Comfort representing the team's work to clients.

• Professional connections in academia, the judiciary and technology policy circles.

• Benefits

• Compensation and benefits

• Base salary: $180K - $250K

• Equity

• Location and work model

• San Francisco, CA, United States

• On-site, in person in San Francisco

• Full-time