About this opportunity
Build AI lists this Founding Legal Counsel opportunity in san francisco, California. Review the employer’s description below for duties, qualifications and application requirements.
Job description
About Build AI
Build AI is the data hyperscaler for Physical AI. We're vertically integrated across hardware, manufacturing, logistics, collection, and model training to scale the physical labor dataset orders of magnitude faster than anyone in the world.
Job Summary
We're hiring a Founding Legal Counsel to own the legal architecture behind Build's global operations. The role reports to the Chief Operating Officer and is Build's first in-house legal hire.
Build designs and manufactures its own hardware, collects data inside working factories and job sites across a growing number of countries, and pays a distributed network of partners and individual collectors at volume. Every new country brings the same stack of questions at once: how fast we can operate before we need an entity, what consent has to look like for the people we record, whether the data can leave the country and on what paper, how collectors and partners are structured, and how they get paid without the banks shutting us down. Today those questions are answered country by country, by outside counsel across several firms, with no one inside the company owning the design.
You will own that design. You will build the consent, data-transfer, entity, and contracting architecture that has to work in twenty countries rather than be rebuilt in each one, run the outside counsel network instead of being routed by it, and paper the commercial agreements on both sides of the business — the partners who collect the data and the customers who license it.
Securities and financing, export controls, national security, tax, and jurisdiction-specific regulatory matters will continue to sit with outside specialist counsel. You will own those relationships and translate that advice into action rather than being the specialist yourself.
You will be hands-on from day one, you will do most of the work yourself before you hire anyone — leveraging AI seamlessly and exhaustively — and you will build the legal infrastructure while the company grows from a founding team to thousands across multiple continents.
Your job is to help Build move quickly without taking risks we don't understand.
Key Responsibilities
Own the legal path into new countries, including entities, EORs, contractors, partners, payments, and local regulatory requirements
Build and own the global consent, privacy, data-transfer, retention, and data-provenance framework
Draft and negotiate customer, partner, vendor, manufacturing, employment, consulting, and other commercial agreements
Own international entity governance, maintenance, statutory obligations, intercompany arrangements, and compliance calendars
Identify and manage regulatory risk across privacy, AI/data, foreign investment, payments, foreign ownership, and international operations
Run diligence on Build's data rights and provenance for customers, regulators, investors, and acquirers
Select and manage outside counsel globally, including scope, fees, quality, and translating specialist advice into action
Partner with Operations, Data Scaling, Finance, Engineering, and Manufacturing to structure new markets, products, and operating models
Make risk legible and give clear recommendations that help the business move quickly without taking risks it doesn't understand
You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)
JD and active bar admission in at least one US jurisdiction, with 6+ years of relevant experience including significant in-house time at a startup or rapidly growing technology company
Owned legal work for a company operating across multiple countries — you have stood up operations in markets you had not worked in before, and dealt with what went wrong after launch
Deep, practical data privacy experience: consent architecture, cross-border transfer, and the ability to work with a regime you have not read before and reach an answer that holds
Strong commercial contracting experience — you have personally drafted and negotiated complex agreements on both the customer and partner/vendor side
Have selected and managed outside counsel across multiple jurisdictions, including pushing back on scope and fees
Comfortable being the entire department before you are the head of one, and comfortable giving a clear recommendation under time pressure with incomplete information
Willing to be in San Francisco in person, and to get on a plane to Shenzhen, India, or any market we are opening when the answer is on the ground
Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)
Legal operations in China, India, Southeast Asia, LATAM, or Africa
AI, data licensing, or another business where the product is data and provenance is the asset
Contractor and worker classification at scale across multiple jurisdictions
Marketplace, gig, or distributed-workforce platforms operating across countries
Biometric, video, or other sensitive-data privacy regimes
Hardware, robotics, or a business that moves its own devices across borders — customs, import/export, and device compliance
Corporate governance for a venture-backed US company with foreign subsidiaries, including entity maintenance and investor or M&A diligence
Working alongside export controls, trade, national security, securities, and financing counsel without needing to be the specialist
Benefits
Competitive pay
Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office
Relocation support for those moving to San Francisco (Financial District) or Shenzhen (Nanshan)
Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more
Daily lunch and dinner in our office
Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification
Unlimited Codex and Claude credits
Travel
How we're different
Build believes in the Bitter Lesson. By taking a general approach of learning from humans, our addressable market is all physical labor.
We are a fully in-person team in San Francisco (Financial District) and Shenzhen (Nanshan), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.
Build AI is an equal opportunity employer.
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Worksite address
san francisco, CA, 94199, US
Who can apply
Review the original listing for work authorization, qualifications and employer requirements.