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Baseten powers mission-critical inference for leading AI companies including Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. The company recently raised $1.5B in Series F funding and is building the platform engineers use to ship AI products.
You will lead the legal work behind Baseten's partnerships and strategic transactions, reporting to the Chief Legal Officer and working directly with founders and partnerships leads. This role sits at the intersection where model labs, hyperscalers, distribution platforms, and major customers meet. You will read, negotiate, and structure the licenses that govern open weight models and turn them into commitments the company can stand behind.
The core of this work involves four interconnected challenges: (1) Open weight licenses are rapidly evolving with usage thresholds, attribution triggers, certified partner exemptions, geographic carve-outs, and commercial-only distribution terms—many written by non-US labs. You will read these instruments first and help the market understand them. (2) Rights and responsibility allocation shifts depending on whether Baseten is licensee, host, distributor, or acting on a customer's behalf. Getting this allocation right and explaining it to customer counsel is central to the role. (3) Partners often serve simultaneously as channels, customers, and competitors. You will structure deals to manage channel conflict, exclusivity, and information flow while keeping Baseten independent and customer-centric. (4) Labs, compute providers, and customers operate across jurisdictions with different rules on export controls, sanctions, data residency, and licensing. Partnership agreements and compliance posture must move together.
Key responsibilities include: leading the legal workstream for model lab relationships (distribution agreements, hosted API arrangements, token and capacity commitments, joint development agreements); leading strategic platform and channel deals (hyperscaler marketplace agreements, white label and reseller structures, co-sell arrangements); building and owning Baseten's framework for open weight and custom model licenses; serving as the legal voice on model licensing in customer deals with direct engagement with customer counsel; advising leadership on channel strategy, conflict, and competition; partnering with regulatory, policy, and security leads on cross-border dimensions; building templates, playbooks, and per-release licensing statements; supporting M&A and strategic transactions; and helping grow the partnerships legal function.
The role values: reading licenses carefully from the actual text rather than assumptions; taking clear positions and defending them; structural thinking about second-order effects; technical fluency in inference, model weights, fine-tuning, multi-tenancy, and deployment models; commercial grounding in which terms to hold and trade; and a builder mentality with low ego and independent operation.
REQUIREMENTS:
- JD and active bar membership in good standing
- 8+ years of technology transactions or partnerships experience, with meaningful in-house time leading partnership, licensing, or platform deals at an AI, cloud, or developer infrastructure company
- Deep familiarity with open source and open weight model licenses, including newer custom licenses from frontier and international labs, with ability to interpret them across deployment models
- Experience structuring strategic partnerships with counterparties who are also customers or competitors, including channel, reseller, marketplace, and co-sell arrangements
- Direct experience allocating IP and indemnity risk in AI or platform agreements and explaining that allocation to sophisticated counterparties
- Clear, direct communication skills to translate license text and deal structure for founders, partnerships leads, and customer counsel
- Ability to learn, build, and master AI tooling and systems to self-serve and operate at high speed
- Desire to become a recognized thought leader in the field
You may excel if you have: led AI partnerships or model licensing legal work at a frontier lab, hyperscaler, or AI platform company; negotiated with or on behalf of model labs; worked on marketplace, gateway, or ecosystem agreements; handled cross-border licensing or distribution with non-US partners; built a licensing framework or playbook from scratch at a fast-growing company; or have a considered view on the open weight ecosystem's future.
