Principal Corporate Counsel: Incubation & Enterprise AI
About The Position
Join our dynamic and strategic Incubation, Data & AI (IDA) Legal team. This role is an exciting opportunity to join our growing team and provide critical legal support to Outshift by Cisco. Outshift is Cisco’s emerging technology incubation engine and advanced innovation organization, with a core mission to explore, research, build, and bring “Shift-Left” and “Shift-Ahead” technologies to market before they hit mainstream adoption. Outshift leads Cisco’s exploration and development of quantum networking technologies, under the umbrella of Cisco Research, and also includes the Open Source Program Office (OSPO). In this role, you will also provide legal support to Cisco’s Enterprise AI Platforms & Infrastructure team, which leads Cisco’s enterprise AI applications like CIRCUIT and MyAgent.
Requirements
- Juris Doctor (JD) with 8+ years of experience in a law firm or in-house legal department.
- Demonstrated experience in product counseling, technology law and transactions, and IP licensing.
- Ability to synthesize complex, ambiguous regulatory landscapes into clear, business-centric advice.
- Exceptional drafting and negotiation skills with the ability to translate nuanced technical and legal concepts into actionable guidance for executives and engineers.
Nice To Haves
- Experience serving as a legal counsel to dynamic and fast-paced product teams.
- General familiarity with open source legal issues, research agreements, brand protection and marketing issues.
- Background in IP and/or patent law.
- External AI governance, privacy, or security certifications (e.g., AIGP, CIPP, CISSP).
- Experience working optimally in cross-functional, global teams.
- A proactive, “builder” mindset; comfortable working in a rapidly evolving environment.
Responsibilities
- Serve as a key legal partner to fast-paced, dynamic incubation teams, focused on building and graduating (or otherwise offloading) truly innovative projects at Cisco.
- Provide valuable, dynamic legal guidance to teams as they collaborate and partner with third parties to ideate, build, prototype, and evolve emerging technologies.
- Help ensure compliance by design, working cross-functionally within and outside of Legal.
- Work with other Legal subject-matter experts to provide agile legal guidance on a range of issues, including joint development and partnerships, regulatory risk, IP and patent protection, data governance and privacy, and AI ethics and risk.
- Provide clear and actionable guidance on complex business and legal issues.
- Leverage and deploy AI to accelerate and streamline guidance to the business teams you support.
- Enable clients to internally deploy, launch, and graduate innovations in a way that builds trust with users and meets your clients’ innovative velocity.
Benefits
- medical, dental and vision insurance
- a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
- paid parental leave
- short and long-term disability coverage
- basic life insurance
- grants of Cisco restricted stock units
- 10 paid holidays per full calendar year
- 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
- 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday
- paid year-end holiday shutdown
- 4 paid days off for personal wellness
- 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year (non-exempt employees)
- flexible vacation time off program (exempt employees)
- 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter
- up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward
- Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
- annual bonuses (for non-sales roles)
- performance-based incentive pay (for sales roles)
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
Ph.D. or professional degree
