Commercial and IP Counsel

Luma•Redwood City, CA

About The Position

Luma is seeking a Commercial and IP Counsel to join its Legal team. This role will support the company's growth by managing commercial contracting, including API, enterprise, and compute/infrastructure deals. The position also involves owning the company's intellectual property strategy and addressing technical IP and data-rights issues specific to generative AI systems. The ideal candidate will develop a deep understanding of how Luma's models are trained and deployed to proactively identify and manage legal risks. This role requires close collaboration with research, applied ML, data, product, and infrastructure teams, and involves making critical judgment calls in a rapidly evolving legal environment.

Requirements

J.D. and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar.
5+ years of experience spanning law firm and in-house work, with substantial time on technology commercial transactions and IP.
Proven track record negotiating SaaS/API agreements, data licensing deals, and cloud/compute or infrastructure contracts with minimal supervision.
Working technical fluency with how generative AI models are built and deployed (training data pipelines, fine-tuning/distillation, model weights and checkpoints, inference serving) sufficient to negotiate terms and issue-spot without translation from engineers.
Substantive experience with the IP issues specific to AI: copyright and training-data rights, output ownership and infringement risk, open-source/open-weight model licensing, and patentability of ML techniques.
Familiarity with the emerging AI regulatory landscape (e.g., EU AI Act, U.S. state AI laws, content-provenance/disclosure rules) and how it intersects with commercial and IP terms.
Excellent judgment on balancing legal risk against the pace of a frontier research company.
A builder's mindset: energized by creating process and infrastructure where none exists yet.
Clear, direct communicator who can explain complex legal and technical tradeoffs to researchers, engineers, and executives alike.

Nice To Haves

Prior in-house experience at a foundation model lab, AI infrastructure company, or developer platform.
Technical background (CS/EE) or fluency reading ML papers.

Responsibilities

Partner closely with the sales team to draft, negotiate, and close API and enterprise agreements.
Build scalable contracting infrastructure, including templates, negotiation playbooks, risk-tiering, and a contract lifecycle process.
Negotiate compute and infrastructure agreements with cloud and GPU providers, as well as agreements with foundation-model or technology partners (e.g., model-hosting, API-reseller, co-development deals).
Structure and negotiate data licensing and content-partnership agreements for training and fine-tuning datasets, covering scope of use, exclusivity, attribution, and downstream rights.
Advise research and engineering on IP ownership for training methods, model weights, checkpoints, and derivative/fine-tuned models, including issues related to open-weight releases and third-party model integration.
Advise on open-source and third-party license compliance for code, model weights, and datasets used in research and production.
Advise on copyright and data-rights issues in sourcing, licensing, and using training and fine-tuning data.
Work with internal stakeholders on output-side IP risk, including substantial-similarity and infringement exposure in generated content, style-mimicry claims, and takedown/DMCA processes.
Advise on content provenance and authenticity questions as they intersect with commercial terms and emerging regulations.
Review and advise on Customer DPAs and privacy questionnaires.