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Handshake is a career platform serving 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions. In 2025, the company launched Handshake AI, a rapidly growing AI data business that partners with frontier AI labs to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and advance AI capabilities. The business has grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and distributes ~$60M monthly to over 30K individuals.
As AI Product Counsel, you will lead legal strategy across Handshake's AI products and platforms, serving as the day-to-day legal partner to product, research, engineering, operations, and go-to-market teams. You will embed with these teams from early product design through customer launch and delivery.
Key responsibilities include:
- Advise on novel legal questions arising from new AI training and evaluation data products, including reinforcement learning environments, personal and business data, and regulated domain data (health, finance).
- Partner with frontier AI labs and enterprise customers on complex, novel commercial relationships and deal structures.
- Support the Handshake AI contractor platform end-to-end: terms, onboarding, identity verification, quality controls, monitoring, and global payouts.
- Build scalable product counseling and AI governance frameworks, including AI-assisted intake workflows, playbooks, templates, data provenance documentation, and self-serve guidance to enable teams to ship with confidence.
- Advise on intellectual property, privacy, and platform product law as they intersect with AI model training, evaluation, and deployment.
You will report to the General Counsel and work within a lean, high-leverage Legal team that values practical judgment, intellectual curiosity, and bias for action.
REQUIREMENTS:
- JD and membership in at least one U.S. state bar.
- 8+ years of legal experience, with significant in-house experience supporting product, platform, or emerging technology teams.
- Deep familiarity with privacy and intellectual property law, and with laws governing AI and platform products.
- Track record of leading and scaling product counseling and legal review programs in fast-paced, high-growth environments.
- Experience working alongside commercial counsel on complex, novel commercial relationships.
- Strong technical fluency and curiosity; ability to partner effectively with engineers, researchers, and product managers.
- Sound judgment under ambiguity; ability to make risk calls without precedent, explain them clearly, and stand behind them.
- Exceptional communication skills and business judgment, balancing legal risk with strategic goals.
- Passion for democratizing access to opportunity and deep interest in AI.
BONUS QUALIFICATIONS:
- Prior experience supporting AI, ML, or data products, or working with AI labs or frontier AI companies.
- Experience with data licensing and data provenance issues.
- Experience with regulated data (health, biometric).
- Familiarity with AI risk management frameworks, bias audit practices, or AI safety and transparency issues.
- Experience working in marketplace or gig platforms.
