Sr. Counsel

Protege

3d

About The Position

We're hiring our second attorney: a hands-on counsel who will work directly with the CLO and own a large share of Protege's day-to-day legal work. This is not a narrow specialist seat. On any given week you'll move between a data licensing agreement with a hospital system, a de-identification question under HIPAA, an NDA for a frontier lab, a vendor BAA, and a cross-border transfer analysis — often several of these in the same day.

The two areas where you'll spend most of your time:
Commercial contracts. Data license agreements, SOWs, NDAs, BAAs, DPAs, and vendor agreements — drafting, redlining, and negotiating with counterparties ranging from health systems and data aggregators to the largest AI builders in the world.
Data & Privacy. HIPAA/CCPA/GDPR and de-identification strategy, business associate posture, privacy policies, cross-border data transfers, and emerging AI regulation. Privacy at Protege isn't a compliance checkbox — it's core to the product on multiple domains.
You'll be the person our business, partnerships, and engineering teams come to first. The legal function here runs through Slack, Notion, and Google Drive, with other AI tooling built into triage and drafting. Requests come in fast, priorities shift, and much of the structure you'll work within is structure you'll help build.

Requirements

• 6+ years of relevant legal experience with significant depth in technology transactions and privacy (healthcare/HIPAA/GDPR/CCPA experience strongly preferred).
• Speed and throughput. You turn documents fast, juggle many matters simultaneously, and know when 80% today beats 100% next week.
• Genuine comfort with ambiguity. You're self-directed, you make judgment calls with incomplete information, and you don't wait to be handed a process — you build one.
• Fluency with modern tools. Our legal work lives in Slack, Notion, and Google Drive, and we use AI systems daily for triage and drafting. Someone who works exclusively in Word attachments and email chains will struggle here; someone who's tech-native will thrive.
• High EQ. You'll counsel colleagues under deadline pressure and negotiate with counterparties across cultures and company sizes. Practical, calm, solution-focused advice is the job. No jargon.
• JD and active bar membership in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.

Nice To Haves

• In-house experience at a technology company shipping products with novel legal risk, ideally involving AI, training data, or health data.
• Experience negotiating data licensing agreements or other data-centric commercial deals.
• Familiarity with de-identification standards (Expert Determination, Safe Harbor) and the healthcare data ecosystem.
• Experience being an early or solo in-house lawyer — building intake, templates, and outside counsel relationships from scratch.

Responsibilities

• Draft, negotiate, and close commercial agreements across our data supply and demand sides — data licensing, SOWs, NDAs, BAAs, DPAs, and novel arrangements that don't have a template yet.
• Counsel teams across the company on data privacy: HIPAA, de-identification, consent, provenance, GDPR/CCPA, and AI-specific regulation as it lands.
• Triage and run a high-volume legal queue — dozens of active matters at a time — deciding what needs deep work, what needs a fast answer, and what needs outside counsel.
• Work directly with technical teams and technical counterparties, translating between legal risk and how the product actually work–in plain and crisp communication style
• Manage and coordinate outside counsel on specialist matters, keeping the work moving, tightly scoped, and the spend sensible.
• Build the legal infrastructure as you go: templates, playbooks, intake, and AI-assisted workflows that make the whole function faster.

What This Job Offers

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