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About the Role
Build AI is seeking a Founding Legal Counsel to establish the legal framework for its global operations. This is the company's first in-house legal hire, reporting to the Chief Operating Officer. The role involves owning the design and implementation of legal structures for international operations, including entity formation, data privacy, cross-border data transfers, and commercial agreements, ensuring the company can scale rapidly and responsibly.
Responsibilities
- Own the legal path into new countries, including entities, EORs, contractors, partners, payments, and local regulatory requirements
- Build and own the global consent, privacy, data-transfer, retention, and data-provenance framework
- Draft and negotiate customer, partner, vendor, manufacturing, employment, consulting, and other commercial agreements
- Own international entity governance, maintenance, statutory obligations, intercompany arrangements, and compliance calendars
- Identify and manage regulatory risk across privacy, AI/data, foreign investment, payments, foreign ownership, and international operations
- Run diligence on Build's data rights and provenance for customers, regulators, investors, and acquirers
- Select and manage outside counsel globally, including scope, fees, quality, and translating specialist advice into action
- Partner with Operations, Data Scaling, Finance, Engineering, and Manufacturing to structure new markets, products, and operating models
- Make risk legible and give clear recommendations that help the business move quickly without taking risks it doesn't understand
Requirements
- JD and active bar admission in at least one US jurisdiction
- 6+ years of relevant experience including significant in-house time at a startup or rapidly growing technology company
- Owned legal work for a company operating across multiple countries
- Deep, practical data privacy experience: consent architecture, cross-border transfer, and the ability to work with a regime you have not read before and reach an answer that holds
- Strong commercial contracting experience — personally drafted and negotiated complex agreements on both the customer and partner/vendor side
- Selected and managed outside counsel across multiple jurisdictions, including pushing back on scope and fees
- Comfortable being the entire department before you are the head of one
- Comfortable giving a clear recommendation under time pressure with incomplete information
- Willing to be in San Francisco in person
- Willing to get on a plane to Shenzhen, India, or any market we are opening when the answer is on the ground
Skills
- Data privacy
- Consent architecture
- Cross-border data transfer
- Commercial contracting
- Outside counsel management
- Risk management
- AI
- Data licensing
- Hardware
- Robotics
- Export controls
- Trade
- National security
- Securities
- Financing
Location
- San Francisco
- Shenzhen
Work Type
- In-person
- Full-time
Experience Level
- 6+ years of relevant experience
- Significant in-house time at a startup or rapidly growing technology company
Education Level
- JD and active bar admission in at least one US jurisdiction
Benefits
- Competitive pay
- Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
- $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
- $2k per month housing subsidy for those living within walking distance of the office
- Relocation support for those moving to San Francisco (Financial District) or Shenzhen (Nanshan)
- Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more
- Daily lunch and dinner in our office
- Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification
- Unlimited Codex and Claude credits
- Travel
About the Company
- Build AI is the data hyperscaler for Physical AI.
- We're vertically integrated across hardware, manufacturing, logistics, collection, and model training to scale the physical labor dataset orders of magnitude faster than anyone in the world.
- Build believes in the Bitter Lesson.
- By taking a general approach of learning from humans, our addressable market is all physical labor.
- We are a fully in-person team in San Francisco (Financial District) and Shenzhen (Nanshan), and greatly value engineering skills.
- We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.
Equal Opportunity
- Build AI is an equal opportunity employer. We review every application. If you do not meet every bullet, still apply.