Sr. Counsel, Commercial and Data

Company Overview:

We are building Protege to solve the biggest unmet need in AI — getting access to the right training data. The process today is time intensive, incredibly expensive, and often ends in failure. The Protege platform facilitates the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data.

Solving AI’s data problem is a generational opportunity. We’re backed by world-class investors and already powering partnerships with some of the most ambitious teams in AI. The company that succeeds will be one of the largest in AI — and in tech.

We’re a lean, fast-moving, high-trust team of builders who are obsessed with velocity and impact. Our culture is built for people who thrive on ambiguity, own outcomes, and want to shape the future of data and AI.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're hiring our second attorney: a hands-on counsel who will work directly with the CLO and own a large share of Protege's day-to-day legal work. This is not a narrow specialist seat. On any given week you'll move between a data licensing agreement with a hospital system, a de-identification question under HIPAA, an NDA for a frontier lab, a vendor BAA, and a cross-border transfer analysis — often several of these in the same day.

The two areas where you'll spend most of your time:

• Commercial contracts. Data license agreements, SOWs, NDAs, BAAs, DPAs, and vendor agreements — drafting, redlining, and negotiating with counterparties ranging from health systems and data aggregators to the largest AI builders in the world.

• Data & Privacy. HIPAA/CCPA/GDPR and de-identification strategy, business associate posture, privacy policies, cross-border data transfers, and emerging AI regulation. Privacy at Protege isn't a compliance checkbox — it's core to the product on multiple domains.

You'll be the person our business, partnerships, and engineering teams come to first. The legal function here runs through Slack, Notion, and Google Drive, with other AI tooling built into triage and drafting. Requests come in fast, priorities shift, and much of the structure you'll work within is structure you'll help build.

WHAT YOU’LL DO:

• Draft, negotiate, and close commercial agreements across our data supply and demand sides — data licensing, SOWs, NDAs, BAAs, DPAs, and novel arrangements that don't have a template yet.

• Counsel teams across the company on data privacy: HIPAA, de-identification, consent, provenance, GDPR/CCPA, and AI-specific regulation as it lands.

• Triage and run a high-volume legal queue — dozens of active matters at a time — deciding what needs deep work, what needs a fast answer, and what needs outside counsel.

• Work directly with technical teams and technical counterparties, translating between legal risk and how the product actually work–in plain and crisp communication style

• Manage and coordinate outside counsel on specialist matters, keeping the work moving, tightly scoped, and the spend sensible.

• Build the legal infrastructure as you go: templates, playbooks, intake, and AI-assisted workflows that make the whole function faster.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

30 days: Learn and Build Relationships

• Meet and partner with the teams who use legal most — partnerships, BD, healthcare, product, and engineering — plus our outside counsel across commercial, privacy, and corporate, to understand intake, escalation paths, where the volume comes from, and where the bottlenecks are.

• Get fluent in how we run: Slack-based intake, the Notion legal tracker, our template library, and the AI tooling we use for triage and drafting.

• Take your first sets of NDAs, SOW redlines, and privacy questions end-to-end with CLO review.

60 days: Develop and Cultivate

• Co-own the day-to-day commercial queue — NDAs, SOWs, DPAs, and BAAs move through you without hand-holding, at turnaround times the business can plan around. We optimize for speed and clarity.

• Run your first data license negotiations end-to-end, from intake throu