Assistant General Counsel, Commercial

Baseten • San Francisco, CA

5d • $225,000 - $275,000

About The Position

Baseten is the AI inference infrastructure that serves the traffic and endpoints behind the most innovative AI-native and enterprise products in the market. We're hiring an Assistant General Counsel, Commercial to own our commercial deal surface as we scale from a high-growth startup into an enterprise-grade AI infrastructure platform. You'll be our primary commercial contracts attorney - embedded directly in the business and partnering day-to-day with Sales, Finance, and Engineering.
At Baseten, commercial and product are the same thing. What we build and sell is inference — compute, orchestration, deployment, and optimization delivered as the production backbone for our customers' products. Closing a deal here means understanding multi-tenancy, model deployment, latency and throughput SLAs, and how a customer's workload actually runs on our platform. This is a role for a commercially minded product lawyer who wants to sit at that intersection, not run a siloed contracts function.
You'll own enterprise commercial contracting end to end, and you'll also own several related strategic surfaces, including model marketplace initiatives and go-to-market partnerships. Your center of gravity is the commercial deal surface; like everyone on this team, you'll also flex onto cross-functional and one-off work where you're needed.

Requirements

• JD and active bar membership in good standing
• 8+ years of commercial / technology transactions experience, with meaningful in-house time at a B2B SaaS, cloud, or developer-infrastructure company
• Demonstrated product-counsel instinct: you've advised a technical product org, not just papered deals, and can hold your own in a conversation about how the product actually works
• Proven ability to negotiate sophisticated enterprise agreements at the redline level and manage high deal volume without losing the details
• Strong working knowledge of data privacy (GDPR, CCPA) and security provisions (DPAs, security addenda) as they surface in commercial contracts
• Clear, direct communicator who can translate legal and technical concepts for non-lawyers and push back constructively without creating deal friction
• Comfortable with significant autonomy in a lean, fast-moving legal function; knows when to own and when to escalate
• The ability to learn, build, and master AI tooling and systems to self-serve and operate at breakneck speed
• A desire to become a recognized thought leader in your field

Nice To Haves

• Experience at an AI, ML, or developer-infrastructure company, or with usage-based / consumption pricing models
• Familiarity with marketplace, model-distribution, or platform / ecosystem agreements
• Experience structuring strategic partnerships, OEM, or co-sell arrangements
• People-management or team-building experience through a high-growth phase
• Comfort with AI-assisted legal tooling and an interest in scaling a lean team through process and technology

Responsibilities

• Own the full lifecycle of enterprise commercial agreements — MSAs, order forms, DPAs, BAAs, SOWs, and NDAs — at volume, as the primary legal partner to Sales and GTM throughout the deal cycle
• Serve as product counsel to the business: advise on how inference, multi-tenancy, model deployment, data flows, and SLAs map to contract terms, and translate technical architecture into risk positions Sales and customers can act on
• Own the commercial and legal terms for model marketplace and model distribution agreements, including the allocation of responsibility between Baseten and model providers
• Lead the legal workstream for go-to-market and strategic partnerships, structuring collaboration, reseller, and co-sell arrangements that protect Baseten's IP and independence while unlocking distribution
• Build, own, and continuously improve Baseten's commercial templates, playbooks, and standard positions against market feedback and leadership risk appetite
• Partner with Finance on revenue recognition and non-standard deal structures, and with Security and Compliance on data protection, regulated-data, and security commitments in customer contracts
• Drive deal velocity — know which terms to hold, which to trade, and how to explain the difference to an AE, a CFO or the CLO
• Advise the CLO on commercial and contractual risk, and proactively advocate for changes to Baseten's positions, playbooks, and risk posture as the product and market evolve
• May assist on M&A and other strategic or one-off transactions as needed
• Help build and mentor the commercial legal team as it scales, and contribute across whatever the team needs

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
• Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
• Paid parental leave
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
• Company-facilitated 401(k)
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed