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About the Role

This is a foundational role as the first legal hire, responsible for all legal matters across the business. You will partner closely with leadership and various teams to enable fast, sustainable growth, with a primary focus on enterprise SaaS contracting, supporting complex sales cycles, and managing risk. You will also oversee corporate, employment, and supplier contracts, governance, and build the necessary legal infrastructure for a scaling AI company.

Responsibilities

• Lead drafting, review, and negotiation of enterprise SaaS agreements, including MSAs, DPAs, SLAs, partnership agreements and security addenda.
• Partner closely with sales and finance to support complex, high-value customer negotiations and shorten deal cycles.
• Develop and maintain contract templates, fallback positions, and negotiation playbooks.
• Advise on pricing structures, licensing models, and commercial risk allocation.
• Own the wider commercial contract stack: NDAs, supplier and vendor terms, reseller and channel agreements, consultancy and services agreements, IP assignments, and procurement.
• Own company secretarial matters end to end: statutory registers, Companies House filings, board and shareholder resolutions, minutes, and the share register alongside Finance.
• Support certain board and investor matters: information rights, investor consents, board papers, and readiness for the next funding round.
• Lead the legal workstream on fundraising and due diligence, and on any M&A, joint venture or strategic partnership structuring.
• Support international expansion into further geographies, including entity setup, intercompany agreements, and working with Finance on transfer pricing documentation.
• Oversee our suite of employment contracts, contractor and consultancy agreements, and offer documentation across UK and international hires.
• Advise the People team on restructures, grievances and exits, including settlement agreements.
• Provide guidance to the People team on employment policies and the handbook, keeping them current as UK employment law changes.
• Advise on right to work, sponsorship, visa and immigration matters as we hire internationally.
• Handle confidentiality, IP assignment and restrictive covenant provisions, which matter particularly for technical hires joining from competitors.
• Provide practical legal guidance on product development, particularly around AI features, data usage, and model deployment.
• Set clear contractual positions on ownership and licensing of model weights: who owns pre-trained and fine-tuned weights, what rights customers acquire in models improved using their operational data and how weights and derivatives are treated on termination.
• Draw and hold the line between training and inference in customer terms: what happens to customer inputs and outputs at inference time, retention and isolation commitments, and whether either may be used to improve the model.
• Advise on ownership of model outputs, accuracy disclaimers, and IP and liability indemnities in safety-critical industrial settings.
• Advise on UK and EU data protection laws (GDPR, UK GDPR) and support customer-facing privacy commitments.
• Track the EU AI Act and emerging AI regulation, and advise on export controls as they apply to models, weights and technical data.
• Help shape internal policies including responsible AI use and data governance.
• Establish scalable legal processes, tools, and documentation for rapid growth, which may include the use of legal-specific AI tools.
• Define when and how to use external counsel across corporate, employment and specialist areas, and manage those relationships and budgets effectively.
• Create internal guidance for commercial, product, people and operational teams.
• Identify key legal and regulatory risks as the business scales.
• Ensure compliance with applicable laws and industry standards.

Requirements

• Qualified solicitor in England & Wales (or equivalent common law jurisdiction).
• 5–10 years’ PQE, ideally with a mix of top-tier law firm and in-house experience.
• Strong experience in enterprise SaaS contracting (essential).
• Experience with AI companies is essential.
• Practical corporate experience covering company secretarial, board and investor matters, and supporting fundraising or transactions.
• Working knowledge of UK employment law, or a clear track record of picking up unfamiliar areas quickly with external counsel support.
• Solid grounding in data protection and technology law, and a good understanding of export controls.
• Comfortable engaging with how AI models are built and served: what model weights are, the difference between training and inference, and what fine-tuning on customer data changes.
• Experience working with high-growth startups is highly preferred.

Skills

• Enterprise SaaS contracting
• AI
• Corporate governance
• Company secretarial
• Employment law
• Data protection
• Technology law
• Export controls
• AI model development and deployment
• Contract negotiation
• Risk management

Location

• UK

Work Type

• Full-time

Experience Level

• 5-10 years PQE

Education Level

• Qualified solicitor

Salary/Compensations

• Competitive salary

Benefits

• Be the first legal hire with full ownership of the function.
• Direct impact on revenue through enterprise deal support.
• Genuine breadth across commercial, corporate, employment and AI regulation in a single role.
• Work at the intersection of AI, data, and enterprise software.
• Competitive salary, benefits and equity.

About the Company

• Applied Computing was founded in 2024 to build Orbital, a physics-informed foundation model for energy operations.
• We’re live across oil and gas, refineries, and petrochemicals, working towards our mission: sustainable abundance for a growing planet.
• The hydrocarbon industry keeps the world running. But its complexity has left operators tied to legacysystems, making critical decisions on less than 10% of available data.
• We built Orbital to change that. It’s a foundation model built specifically for energy that lets companies use AI at scale, harnessing all of their operational data and optimising in real time for any metric.
• Decisions get faster, operations get safer, and carbon intensity falls.
• We’ve raised over $32 million, including one of the largest seed rounds for an AI company in the UK.
• We’re just getting started.