Associate Director/Director, Frontier and AI Product Counsel

Lila Sciences • Cambridge, MA

10d • $232,000 - $360,000

About The Position

Lila Sciences is seeking an experienced attorney to serve as the dedicated legal partner to teams developing its Scientific Superintelligence™ initiative, including its AI research organization, AI Science Factory™ platform, and supporting data, safety, and security functions. The role addresses legal questions involving frontier models trained on scientific data and autonomous experimentation, including data provenance and permitted uses, allocation of rights with partners, publication and open-source decisions, and responsible system development, evaluation, and release.

This is a build-focused role involving novel legal questions without settled precedent or established playbooks. The attorney will work closely with scientists, ML researchers, platform engineers, safety and security teams, and colleagues in privacy, commercial, and go-to-market functions. The role translates between technical realities and legal risk, and reports to the Vice President, Associate General Counsel, Product. It is scoped for an attorney with 7–12 years of experience who is comfortable with ambiguity and motivated to work at the intersection of law, AI, and science.

The position covers data and model development; model, agent, tool, and dataset release and disclosure; AI safety, security, dual-use, and biosecurity; regulation and research infrastructure; and the creation of scalable legal frameworks, templates, and self-serve guidance. The attorney will also use AI tools to extend the reach of a small legal team.

Requirements

• J.D. and membership in at least one U.S. state bar in good standing.
• 7–12 years of legal experience, with substantial in-house experience at a technology, AI, or life sciences company; ideally spanning research-facing and product- or customer-facing counseling.
• Depth in at least two of the following areas: copyright and IP, data licensing and provenance, privacy and data protection, AI regulation, model launch and deployment counseling, or research and collaboration transactions.
• Technical fluency to discuss how models are trained, evaluated, and deployed, read a research protocol, and identify legal issues within technical designs.
• Sound judgment under uncertainty and the ability to provide clear, practical advice on unsettled legal questions.
• Strong ownership and the ability to build cross-functional relationships so teams involve legal early in decision-making.
• Excellent written communication, including the ability to draft policies, frameworks, or whitepapers that non-lawyers can use.
• Comfort operating outside areas of expertise, taking on varied responsibilities, and moving at startup speed without losing rigor.

Nice To Haves

• A STEM background or advanced degree, particularly in biology, chemistry, materials, or computer science.
• Experience advising AI research teams on training data, model development, or model release decisions.
• Experience advising on enterprise or API product deployment, including data governance, tenancy and access controls, connectors, or agentic features.
• Experience coordinating model launches or drafting model documentation, system cards, or capability evaluation write-ups.
• Experience with AI-generated invention and inventorship questions, or patent strategy in an AI-driven discovery setting.
• Familiarity with dual-use, biosecurity, export control, or CFIUS considerations.
• Experience supporting academic collaborations, consortium agreements, or federally funded research.
• An academic or publishing background, or depth in open-source and data licensing.
• Experience engaging directly with regulators or standards bodies.
• Experience building legal infrastructure and scalable processes from scratch.
• Enthusiasm for transforming legal practice through AI and data-driven tools.

Responsibilities

• Advise research and data teams on permissible data use throughout the training pipeline and build data provenance and acquisition frameworks.
• Provide subject-matter guidance on copyright, licensing, privacy, and contractual restrictions affecting public, licensed, synthetic, open-source, and partner-contributed training data.
• Support the structuring and negotiation of data licensing, material transfer, consortium, and research collaboration agreements, including allocation of rights in data, models, and derived outputs.
• Advise on release decisions for models, agents, tools, and datasets, including open-weight strategy and open-source licensing for code, data, and model artifacts.
• Coordinate legal readiness for model and platform launches, including model documentation, system cards, capability evaluations, and reviews of pre-release and internal-only models.
• Support publication and disclosure review, balancing scientific openness with partner obligations and safety considerations.
• Counsel research teams on research design, data collection and sharing, external collaborations, program launches, and alignment, interpretability, and societal-impact work.
• Counsel platform teams on legal considerations related to autonomous experimentation and agentic systems.
• Partner with AI Safety and AI Security teams on legal aspects of technical mitigations, evaluations, red-teaming, misuse prevention, vendor engagements, and external collaborations.
• Advise on dual-use and biosecurity issues arising from autonomous chemistry and biology, including screening, access controls, and disclosure.
• Help operationalize the safety framework as capabilities scale, translating capability thresholds into evaluations, access controls, documented mitigations, and release decisions.
• Serve as a first-line contact for safety and security escalations and develop playbooks to scale the response.
• Track and interpret relevant regulation, including emerging AI regimes, health and research data rules, human-subject and biospecimen requirements, and export controls.
• Support compute and infrastructure arrangements, including cloud and datacenter agreements, cross-border data transfers, and data localization.
• Represent Lila in regulatory inquiries and contribute to industry and academic work on data governance and safety norms for AI-driven science.
• Design frameworks, templates, and self-serve guidance that enable teams to apply legal judgment, using AI tools to extend the reach of a small team.

Benefits

• Competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity.
• Comprehensive benefits program for full-time U.S. employees, including medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Employer-paid life and disability insurance.
• Flexible time off and generous company-wide holidays.
• Paid parental leave.
• Educational assistance program.
• Commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office-based employees.
• Company-subsidized lunch program.
• Region-tailored comprehensive benefits program for full-time employees outside the U.S.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree