Commercial and IP Counsel
Remote • Redwood City, CA • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Luma is seeking a Commercial and IP Counsel to join our Legal team and support the company's growth as we develop and release advanced multimodal AI models. Reporting to the General Counsel, this role will manage commercial contracts for API, enterprise, and compute/infrastructure deals, and lead the intellectual property strategy, focusing on the unique IP and data-rights challenges of generative AI systems. The ideal candidate will gain a deep understanding of our model training and deployment processes, including data sourcing, licensing, model architecture, fine-tuning, and inference infrastructure, to proactively identify and address legal issues. You will collaborate daily with research, applied ML, data, product, and infrastructure teams, making critical judgment calls in a rapidly evolving legal and regulatory environment.
Responsibilities
- Draft, negotiate, and close API and enterprise agreements in partnership with the sales team.
- Develop scalable contracting infrastructure, including templates, negotiation playbooks, risk-tiering, and contract lifecycle processes.
- Negotiate compute and infrastructure agreements with cloud and GPU providers, as well as agreements with foundation-model or technology partners.
- Structure and negotiate data licensing and content-partnership agreements for training and fine-tuning datasets.
- Advise research and engineering teams on IP ownership for training methods, model weights, checkpoints, and derivative models.
- Advise on open-source and third-party license compliance for code, model weights, and datasets.
- Advise on copyright and data-rights issues related to sourcing, licensing, and using various types of training data.
- Address output-side IP risks, including substantial similarity, infringement exposure, style-mimicry claims, and DMCA processes.
- Advise on content provenance and authenticity in relation to commercial terms and emerging regulations.
- Review and advise on Customer DPAs and privacy questionnaires.
Requirements
- Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar.
- 5+ years of experience in law firm and in-house settings, with significant focus on technology commercial transactions and IP.
- Proven experience negotiating SaaS/API agreements, data licensing deals, and cloud/compute or infrastructure contracts with minimal supervision.
- Sufficient technical fluency in generative AI model development and deployment (training data pipelines, fine-tuning, model weights, inference serving) to negotiate terms and identify issues without translation.
- Substantive experience with AI-specific IP issues, including copyright and training-data rights, output ownership, open-source/open-weight licensing, and ML patentability.
- Familiarity with the emerging AI regulatory landscape and its intersection with commercial and IP terms.
- Excellent judgment in balancing legal risk with the pace of a frontier research company.
- A builder's mindset, energized by creating new processes and infrastructure.
- Clear and direct communication skills to explain complex legal and technical tradeoffs to diverse stakeholders.
- Bonus: Prior in-house experience at a foundation model lab, AI infrastructure company, or developer platform; technical background (CS/EE) or fluency in reading ML papers.