SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Protege is building a platform to solve AI's biggest unmet need: secure, efficient, and privacy-centric access to training data. The company is backed by world-class investors and already powers partnerships with leading AI teams.
You will be Protege's second attorney, working directly with the Chief Legal Officer to own a large share of day-to-day legal work. This is a hands-on, generalist role spanning commercial contracts and data privacy. On any given week, you'll move between data licensing agreements with hospital systems, HIPAA de-identification questions, NDAs for frontier labs, vendor BAAs, and cross-border transfer analyses—often several in the same day.
Key responsibilities:
- Draft, negotiate, and close commercial agreements across data supply and demand: data licensing, SOWs, NDAs, BAAs, DPAs, and novel arrangements without existing templates.
- Counsel teams on data privacy: HIPAA, de-identification, consent, provenance, GDPR/CCPA, and emerging AI regulation.
- Triage and manage a high-volume legal queue (dozens of active matters), deciding what needs deep work, fast answers, or outside counsel.
- Work directly with technical teams and counterparties, translating legal risk into plain, crisp communication.
- Manage and coordinate outside counsel on specialist matters, keeping work scoped and spend sensible.
- Build legal infrastructure: templates, playbooks, intake processes, and AI-assisted workflows.
Success milestones:
30 days: Learn the business, meet key stakeholders (partnerships, BD, healthcare, product, engineering), understand intake and escalation paths, and get fluent in Slack-based intake, Notion tracking, templates, and AI tooling. Take first NDAs, SOW redlines, and privacy questions end-to-end.
60 days: Co-own the day-to-day commercial queue with predictable turnaround times. Run your first data license negotiations end-to-end. Take ownership of at least one standing privacy workstream (de-identification posture, cross-border transfers, or privacy policy maintenance).
90 days: Co-own commercial and privacy queues with CLO engagement on strategy. Ship at least three infrastructure improvements (template, playbook, or AI workflow) that measurably speed up legal work. Be the trusted first call for the business.
The legal function runs through Slack, Notion, and Google Drive with AI tooling built into triage and drafting. Requests come in fast, priorities shift, and much of the structure you'll help build.
REQUIREMENTS:
Minimum qualifications:
- 6+ years of relevant legal experience with significant depth in technology transactions and privacy (healthcare/HIPAA/GDPR/CCPA experience strongly preferred).
- Speed and throughput: turn documents fast, juggle many matters simultaneously, know when 80% today beats 100% next week.
- Genuine comfort with ambiguity: self-directed, make judgment calls with incomplete information, don't wait to be handed a process.
- Fluency with modern tools: Slack, Notion, Google Drive, and AI systems in daily use. Tech-native approach required; Word attachments and email chains will not work here.
- High EQ: counsel colleagues under deadline pressure, negotiate across cultures and company sizes with practical, calm, solution-focused advice. Communicate in bullet points, not paragraphs.
- JD and active bar membership in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.
Preferred qualifications:
- 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 as an early or solo in-house lawyer building intake, templates, and outside counsel relationships from scratch.
