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Salary: USD 165,000 - 190,000 / annual
InstaLILY is an AI products and infrastructure company that has raised nearly $100 million and achieved 5x revenue growth over the past year. The company's flagship product, Lily, is an AI Forward Deployed Engineer that learns how businesses work, builds needed software, and goes live in days. InstaLILY serves leading companies across construction, industrial distribution, logistics, healthcare, and other operationally intensive industries.
You will be InstaLILY's first Deal Desk Lead, owning every customer agreement end-to-end: SOWs, MSAs, DPAs, Schedule A (IP, ownership, exit), SLAs, and order forms. This role sits between commercial contracting and technical scoping. Currently, this work is split across engineering and growth leadership; you become the primary author and bring leadership in only for decisions that require them.
Key responsibilities include:
- Drafting first SOWs same-day when deals are awarded, configuring AI deployments (data sources, integrations, hosting, success criteria, fees, PoC-to-production paths)
- Owning the full agreement set (MSA, SLA, DPA, Schedule A) for each deal, choosing appropriate base documents including customer paper when needed
- Running redline cycles with customer legal, procurement, and security teams, delivering tracked changes with rationales, clean copies, and status logs
- Keeping every agreement moving and reporting turnaround and time-to-signature metrics weekly to sales leadership
- Teaching sales reps what they can and cannot commit to, ensuring deals arrive properly scoped
- Ensuring consistency and accuracy across all documents: fees match proposals, dates are correct, defined terms are defined, cross-references resolve
- Protecting scope on data sources, integrations, regions, user groups, and post-PoC expansion
- Working with engineering on hosting, tenancy, region, data handling, model ownership, and support commitments
- Preparing and negotiating DPAs including SCCs and UK Addendum, sub-processor lists, and security annexes
- Getting appropriate approvals from growth, engineering, and leadership, escalating only decisions that need them
- Owning the template library, clause library, and pre-approved fallback positions, feeding learnings back into standard forms
- Building the deal desk function: intake process, agreement tracker, turnaround targets, executed copy handoff, and tooling (contract management, document automation, AI-assisted drafting)
This is an individual contributor role reporting to the COO. Revenue grew 5x last year and the sales team is scaling; you will be issuing multiple SOWs daily next year, so the role requires speed and process-building at volume.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5 to 8 years drafting and negotiating commercial agreements for B2B software or technology services companies (deal desk, in-house contracts, legal operations, or technology transactions practice followed by in-house role)
- Startup experience at a company still figuring it out, without general counsel, contracts team, or settled templates
- Command of core MSA, SOW, order form, and SLA terms: liability caps and super-caps, indemnities, IP ownership and licensing, data rights, acceptance, termination, renewal
- Working knowledge of GDPR and UK GDPR, SCCs and UK Addendum, controller and processor roles, sub-processors, US state privacy law
- Technical fluency with cloud hosting, tenancy, data flows, integrations, and model ownership
- Precision in catching undefined terms, broken cross-references, conflicting dates, and contradictory language
- Commercial judgment to distinguish material terms from deal-blocking issues
- Speed under load: multiple agreements in parallel with same-day turnaround without sacrificing accuracy
- Ability to understand customer and rep pressure, propose creative solutions, and stay steady under tension
- Hands-on: you do drafting, redlines, and tracking yourself (no paralegal or coordinator)
- Clear writing ability to explain contract terms to non-lawyers
- End-to-end ownership without in-house legal team support, knowing when to escalate
- Daily user of Claude and frontier AI tools for drafting, comparison, and consistency checks, accountable for every word
- 5 days/week in-person availability at New York office; occasional early calls with UK and European counterparties
Nice to have: JD and bar admission; experience with AI/data products (model ownership, training restrictions, EU AI Act); contracting with PE-backed companies; setting up deal desk or contracts function from scratch including contract management systems or document automation (Ironclad, Docassemble); familiarity with security questionnaires and SOC 2; background in industrial distribution, manufacturing, healthcare, or supply chain.
