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Salary: USD 200,000 - 400,000 / annual
Traversal is an AI Site Reliability Engineer (AI SRE) platform for enterprises, autonomously diagnosing, fixing, and preventing production incidents in complex environments. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and other top-tier investors, with a team including researchers from MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and Cornell, plus operators from Google, Meta, Datadog, ServiceNow, and Citadel Securities.
As Senior Legal Counsel, you will be Traversal's first legal hire, building the legal function from the ground up while reporting to the Head of Strategy & Operations. You will have direct visibility into deals, product strategy, and executive decision-making.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own commercial contracting end-to-end: draft, negotiate, and close enterprise customer agreements (MSAs, DPAs, security/privacy addenda, order forms) with large enterprise customers, balancing legal risk with sales velocity.
- Build the legal function from scratch—templates, playbooks, and approval workflows—so the business can scale without bottlenecking on legal review.
- Serve as primary legal advisor to the executive team on corporate matters: entity governance, board materials, equity administration, and support for future fundraising.
- Own compliance and risk across data privacy and security certifications (SOC 2, GDPR/CCPA) and emerging regulatory considerations relevant to an AI product operating inside customers' production environments.
- Advise on employment matters (offer letters, policies, terminations) and partner with the Head of Operations on vendor and procurement contracts.
- Manage outside counsel relationships across specialty areas (IP, litigation, international expansion) for efficient, cost-effective use of external legal spend.
- Proactively flag legal and regulatory risk to leadership as Traversal scales into new markets and customer segments.
REQUIREMENTS:
- J.D. and active bar admission; NY admission preferred given in-office location.
- Corporate law experience combined with hands-on commercial contract negotiation at an early-stage startup (firm requirement).
- 7+ years of legal experience, with a mix of law firm training and in-house experience, ideally at a B2B SaaS or enterprise software company.
- Deep expertise drafting and negotiating enterprise commercial agreements (MSAs, SaaS terms, DPAs, security addenda) with sophisticated enterprise counterparties.
- Working knowledge of data privacy and security frameworks (GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2) relevant to software with access to customer production systems.
- Comfort operating as a generalist "department of one"—able to triage corporate, employment, and compliance questions, escalating to outside counsel when needed.
- Willing and able to work 5 days/week in-person in New York office (near Madison Square Park).
- Strong business judgment, balancing legal risk against commercial velocity in a fast-moving startup environment.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, able to explain legal concepts clearly to non-legal stakeholders.
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience with AI/ML-specific legal and regulatory issues (model risk, AI governance frameworks, emerging AI regulation).
- Experience supporting fundraising (venture financings, SAFEs, board governance).
- Familiarity with contract lifecycle management (CLM) tooling and legal ops processes.
