Legal Counsel

About the role

We are hiring for a Legal Counsel to be attorney #2 at River AI, an AI lab that is on a fast technological trajectory and that closed its first round of funding ($1.1 Billion) eight weeks after coming out of stealth.   We are looking for a first-principles type of person who also loves to be an operator and to roll up their sleeves.  Responsibilities will encompass commercial, product, corporate, employment, and all sorts of novel areas of law that come with frontier technologies.  If you are the entrepreneurial type, this is your chance to jump in at a start-up!

We are a team that is genuinely interested in working smarter. You will have real room to deploy AI to take the repetitive or tedious tasks off your plate, so your time goes to meaningful work.

Who we are

At River AI, our mission is to create personal AI owned and shaped by each individual. To achieve this, we are building the full stack required for people and organizations to create AI models of their own—from training infrastructure and open-weight model post-training to personal hardware and next-generation interfaces.

We are scientists, engineers, and builders from the industry’s leading technology companies and AI labs. Our team has experience scaling consumer products to hundreds of millions of users and building the infrastructure behind frontier AI systems.

What you'll do 

• Serve as a primary legal advisor to the business, partnering directly with founders and leaders across engineering, research, product, people, and go-to-market, and support financing rounds.
• Draft, negotiate, and close a high volume of commercial agreements end-to-end — compute/infrastructure, SaaS, licensing, vendor, partnership, and customer agreements — and build the templates and playbooks that let the company scale.
• Provide product counseling on AI/ML offerings from design through launch, including terms of service, data licensing and provenance, open-weight model releases, privacy, and IP strategy.
• Advise on employment matters across the employee lifecycle — offers, equity, contractor/EOR arrangements, workplace policies, and sensitive investigations — in close coordination with the People team.
• Track and interpret the fast-moving AI regulatory landscape (federal, state, and international) and translate it into practical guidance and compliance programs.
• Manage outside counsel efficiently, knowing what to handle yourself and when and how to escalate.
• Build the legal function itself: put better processes and AI tooling in place, and drive issues to resolution.

Skills & Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:

• J.D. from an accredited law school and active membership in the California bar (or eligibility to register as in-house counsel in California).
• 6+ years of combined experience at a top law firm and in-house at a high-growth technology company, with significant ownership of product, commercial, corporate or other legal subject matter expertise.  
• A first-principles thinker: comfortable being the first point of contact on unfamiliar legal questions, forming an informed view quickly, and knowing when to call in a specialist.
• Strong drafting and negotiation skills, with the judgment to give crisp, risk-calibrated, business-forward advice rather than memos.
• Discretion and sound judgment handling sensitive matters and information; you build trust across the company.
• Genuine enthusiasm for technology and AI, with fluency in modern software and AI tooling and a habit of using it to work faster and better.
• Clear communicator in writing and in person, able to make complex legal issues legible to non-lawyers.
• Able to work full-time on-site in Palo Alto to support a fast-growing startup’s needs.
• Have plenty of fuel to run at a fast-paced start-up.

Preferred Qualifications: (We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all of these)

• Privacy or regulatory expertise: CIPP/US and EU certifications or experience negotiating directly with regulators around the world.
• Engineering or science background.
• Experience with healthcare and financial verticals.
• Familiarity with equity management platforms (e.g. Carta).
• Experience with financing rounds.

Logistics & Benefits

• Location: Palo Alto, California (on-site, Monday-Friday)
• Compensation:  Depending on experience and skills, the expected base pay is $330,000–$380,000 USD per year, plus equity.  Exceptions may be considered depending upon skills and experience.
• Benefits:  Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance; unlimited PTO.