Director, Legal Commercial | United States | Remote

Grafana Labs

3d•$275,000 - $325,000•Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is seeking a Director, Legal - Commercial (Americas) to join their dedicated, collaborative, and fast-growing team. This role will serve as a senior strategic legal partner to the business, with primary responsibility for leading the company's most complex, high-impact, revenue-generating transactions. The role involves partnering closely with sales leadership and other senior stakeholders to structure, negotiate, and close sophisticated enterprise SaaS, on-premises, and strategic commercial agreements. Additionally, this role will provide leadership within the Americas commercial legal team by managing, mentoring, and developing attorneys, offering guidance on complex negotiations, promoting consistent contracting practices, and helping scale the team's operations and processes. This is a player-coach role combining people management with hands-on commercial attorney responsibilities. The role also supports broader commercial legal initiatives, including advising on strategic go-to-market models, channel programs, privacy and regulatory matters, commercial policies, maintaining and improving commercial legal templates and playbooks, and partnering with cross-functional stakeholders on strategic business initiatives. The ideal candidate is a creative and analytical thinker with exceptional business judgment, who is highly detail-oriented and embraces a pragmatic, business-first approach to legal counseling. They possess the strategic thinking, executive presence, and interpersonal skills to build trusted advisor relationships across the organization while remaining approachable, collaborative, and solutions-oriented. The candidate should have significant experience leading negotiations of complex, high-value commercial agreements with Fortune 500 and other sophisticated enterprise customers, often negotiating on customer paper and within highly regulated industries. They are comfortable navigating novel legal and commercial issues, balancing risk with business objectives, and partnering cross-functionally to drive strategic outcomes. This individual is an exceptional drafter, strategic negotiator, and people leader who can quickly distinguish material legal risk from negotiable issues and develop practical solutions. They have a proven track record of serving as a trusted advisor to business leaders, successfully managing sophisticated counterparties, and mentoring attorneys while helping elevate the overall capabilities of the commercial legal team.

Requirements

JD or equivalent U.S. law degree and active bar membership in good standing in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.
10+ years of commercial legal experience supporting technology companies in the SaaS industry with demonstrated experience leading complex, high-value enterprise technology transactions, including negotiations with Fortune 500 and other large enterprise customers.
Demonstrated experience managing, mentoring and developing attorneys.
Exceptional judgment with the ability to balance legal risk and business objectives in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
Proven ability to build trusted relationships with senior business stakeholders and provide practical, business-oriented legal advice.
Significant experience with data protection and privacy laws (including GDPR and CCPA), information security terms and technology contracting.
Outstanding drafting, negotiation, communication, and interpersonal skills.
Proven ability to independently manage numerous complex, business-critical matters and competing priorities.
Demonstrated ability to improve legal processes, develop scalable contracting resources and drive operational excellence.

Nice To Haves

Recognition from sales or business teams for exceptional partnership, responsiveness and commercial judgment.
Familiarity with open-source software licensing.

Responsibilities

Lead the strategy, negotiation and execution of the company's most complex, high-value commercial transactions, including enterprise SaaS, self-managed software, data processing, information security, channel, strategic partnership and other technology-related agreements, including agreements involving artificial intelligence, generative AI and other emerging technologies.
Serve as a trusted advisor to sales leadership and other senior stakeholders on commercial strategy, deal structuring, negotiation strategy and legal risk to help accelerate revenue while appropriately protecting the company.
Partner closely with the Deputy General Counsel, Commercial Legal, on significant commercial matters, strategic initiatives and the continued growth and evolution of the commercial legal function.
Manage and mentor assigned attorneys on the Americas commercial legal team through coaching, performance feedback, and guidance on complex negotiations and legal issues.
Partner with cross-functional teams to resolve complex commercial and operational issues and support new products, pricing models and go-to-market initiatives.
Develop and continuously improve commercial agreement templates, playbooks, policies and legal processes to drive consistency, efficiency and scalability across the commercial legal function.
Evaluate and leverage AI-enabled legal technologies and workflows to improve contracting efficiency, enhance legal operations, support data-driven decision-making and enable the commercial legal team to scale while maintaining high-quality legal work.
Build strong relationships across the company and foster a practical, collaborative and business-oriented approach to legal partnership.