Senior Legal Counsel, Product and Commercial

About Vercel:

Vercel gives developers the tools and cloud infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. As the team behind v0, Next.js, and AI SDK, Vercel helps customers like Ramp, Supreme, PayPal, Chick-fil-A, and Under Armour build for the AI-native web.

Our mission is to enable the world to ship the best products. That starts with creating a place where everyone can do their best work. Whether you're building on our platform, supporting our customers, or shaping our story: You can just ship things.

About the Role:

We are looking for an experienced technical and business-minded Senior Counsel to join our small but mighty Legal team. You will partner closely with Engineering, Product, Design and Security teams to provide all aspects of legal support throughout the product development lifecycle, while also building out processes and programs as a foundational member of the team. This is a senior individual contributor role that is a combination of product counseling as well as supporting our commercial transactions, and the ideal candidate will be conversant in both engineering and sales speak. On a daily basis you will be digging deep with engineering to figure out what they are doing to help them ship while also reviewing and agreements to support our sales and procurement teams. This position reports to the Senior Director of Legal and plays a pivotal role in advancing our product and go-to market initiatives.

What You Will Do:

• Serve as one of the first points of contact for legal issues throughout the product development lifecycle and provide practical day to day and strategic advice to the engineering, product, and design teams.
• Work with cross-functional teams to build scalable processes to provide products that our customers can trust.
• Support the readiness and release of products and features by identifying and driving resolution of issues related to privacy, data security, marketing, competition, intellectual property, and other legal and regulatory areas.
• Provide practical day-to-day legal support to sales and procurement, including negotiation of partnership, reseller, customer, and vendor agreements.
• Draft and maintain templates and agreements, including API terms, partnership and reseller agreements, data protection addendum
• Address a variety of issues of first impression and other special projects as needed.

About You:

• Admitted to the California Bar or eligible for Registered In-House Counsel exception and in good standing.
• 8+ years of legal experience, including 4+ years of combined in-house commercial and product legal experience at a software technology company.
• Computer science degree or technical background in software engineering for the web.
• Significant experience counseling product and engineering teams through the product development lifecycle from conception to launch and advising on the legal and regulatory aspects of product development in the software industry.
• Strong understanding of cloud services and general SaaS, PaaS, IaaS business practices and relevant global regulatory requirements, with a willingness to dig deep into Vercel’s growing and evolving product offerings in order to build a solid foundation for providing support across all relevant lines of business.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and cooperative team player, willing to take on additional responsibilities where no job is too small or too large.
• Strong judgment and risk-assessment and mitigation skills with the ability to make recommendations and decisions with imperfect facts, adapting legal requirements in creative and pragmatic ways to facilitate communication and understanding at all levels of the organization.
• Ability to confidently and independently manage and negotiate technology agreements with a wide variety of customers and technology and professional services vendors.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment with a proven track record of building new or improving existing programs or processes at other high-growth companies.

Bonus If You:

• Used Vercel’s products and services.
• Experience with intellectual property or open source software.
• Supported channel and reseller partnerships.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation package, including equity.
• Inclusive Healthcare Package.
• Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.
• Flexible Time Off.
• We will provide you the gear you need to do your role, and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.

The San Francisco, CA base pay range for this role is $240,000.00 - $300,000.00.  This salary range is an estimate. Actual salary will be based on job related skills, experience and location. Pay ranges outside San Francisco may be  adjusted based on employee location.  The total compensation package also includes benefits and equity-based compensation. Your recruiter can share more about the specific pay range for your location during the hiring process.

Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Vercel encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.

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