Deal Desk Lead (SOWs, MSAs, DPAs)

INSTALILY.AI•New York, NY

5d•$165,000 - $190,000•Onsite

About The Position

InstaLILY is seeking its first Deal Desk Lead to manage all customer agreements from start to finish, including SOWs, MSAs, DPAs, Schedule A (IP, ownership and exit), SLAs, and order forms. This role will transition from current authors in engineering and growth leadership to become the primary author, involving leadership only for necessary decisions. The position requires a blend of commercial contracting and technical scoping expertise, with the ability to work at speed and build processes to handle increasing deal volume. This is an individual contributor role reporting to the COO.

Requirements

5 to 8 years of experience drafting and negotiating commercial agreements for a B2B software or technology services company.
Experience in deal desk, in-house contracts, legal operations, or a technology transactions practice followed by an in-house role.
Startup experience, having worked in a company that was still developing its processes and lacked a general counsel, contracts team, or settled templates.
Command of core terms in MSAs, SOWs, order forms, and SLAs, including liability caps, indemnities, IP ownership and licensing, data rights, acceptance, termination, and renewal.
Working knowledge of GDPR and UK GDPR, SCCs and the UK Addendum, controller and processor roles, sub-processors, and US state privacy laws.
Technical fluency, with comfort in cloud hosting and tenancy, data flows, integrations, and understanding customer ownership of models.
High level of precision in identifying undefined terms, broken cross-references, conflicting dates, and contradictory statements.
Strong commercial judgment to prioritize terms and avoid holding up deals unnecessarily.
Ability to manage multiple agreements in parallel and provide same-day turnaround without sacrificing accuracy.
Creative problem-solving skills to propose solutions that work for both parties and maintain composure during tense negotiations.
Hands-on approach, performing drafting, redlining, and tracking personally.
Clear writing skills to explain legal terms to non-legal professionals.
Ownership mentality, managing the process end-to-end and knowing when to escalate.
Daily use of AI tools like Claude for drafting, comparison, and consistency checks, and accountability for all drafted content.
Availability to work 5 days a week in the New York office.
Willingness to participate in occasional early calls with UK and European counterparties.

Nice To Haves

Juris Doctor (JD) and bar admission.
Experience with AI or data products, including model ownership, training restrictions, and EU AI Act obligations.
Experience contracting with private-equity-backed companies and their procurement and security teams.
Experience setting up a deal desk or contracts function from scratch, including implementing a contract management system or document automation tools (e.g., Ironclad, Docassemble).
Familiarity with security questionnaires and SOC 2.
Background in industrial distribution, manufacturing, healthcare, or supply chain industries.

Responsibilities

Drafting first versions of every SOW, transforming proposals, call notes, pricing guidance, and written commitments into complete order forms and SOWs, utilizing InstaLILY's standard language and precedent library, with same-day first drafts for awarded deals.
Owning the full agreement set for each deal, including MSA, SLA, DPA, and Schedule A (IP, ownership, exit, and data isolation), determining when to use customer paper.
Managing redline cycles with customer legal, procurement, and security teams, providing tracked changes with rationales, clean copies, and logs of changes.
Ensuring speed to signature by tracking agreement progress, reporting turnaround times and time-to-signature weekly, and proactively flagging stalled deals.
Enabling the sales team by educating them on commitments and ensuring deals are scoped correctly.
Maintaining consistency and accuracy across all documents, ensuring alignment with proposals, correct dates, defined terms, resolved cross-references, and absence of merge artifacts or stray comments.
Protecting scope by bounding data sources, integrations, regions, user groups, and post-PoC expansion, and identifying language that alters InstaLILY's promises.
Collaborating with engineering to ensure accuracy in hosting, tenancy, region, data handling, model ownership, and support commitments, and understanding how architectural changes impact contract language.
Preparing and negotiating DPAs, including SCCs, UK Addendum, sub-processor lists, and security annexes, and routing security questionnaires.
Obtaining necessary approvals from growth, engineering, and leadership, presenting decisions with recommendations.
Owning the template library, clause library, and pre-approved fallback positions, and incorporating learnings from negotiations into standard forms.
Building the deal desk function by establishing intake processes, tracking agreements, setting turnaround targets, and managing the handoff of executed copies, while also shaping tooling for contract management, document automation, and AI-assisted drafting.