Startups · AI

Senior Director - AI Commercial Counsel

Handshake · San Francisco, CA · On-site

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About Handshake

Backed by Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed.

About the role

Reporting to the General Counsel, you'll define and lead the commercial legal strategy for Handshake AI and Handshake AI Enterprise, with a focus on our most strategic frontier lab and enterprise customers. You'll serve as lead lawyer, strategic advisor, and deal quarterback on high-value, bespoke transactions.

What they're looking for

  • JD and active membership in good standing in at least one U.S. state bar (California admission or eligibility to register as in-house counsel in California)
  • 10+ years of combined legal experience, including law firm training and in-house experience at a sophisticated technology company
  • A track record of structuring, negotiating, and closing complex, high-value commercial transactions with enterprise customers
  • Deep experience with enterprise technology and data licensing, including data-use rights, IP, privacy, and security terms
  • Exceptional commercial instinct and judgment, with the ability to identify what matters and calibrate risk to business objectives
  • Executive presence and comfort with ambiguity, with the communication skills to earn trust with fast-moving internal teams and senior stakeholders
More about this role

Handshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career, regardless of where they went to school or who they know. Today, we power 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions.

In 2025, we started Handshake AI and built the fastest-growing AI data business in history. We work directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and push the boundary of data. We've grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and pay ~$60M to over 30K individuals every month.

Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel

Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world's top educational institutions

Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders

Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue

Human data is the core infrastructure to AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities with various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe that data spend for AI training will increase by 3-5x...

Read the full posting on Handshake's site ↗

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