[Hiring] Senior Counsel @Protege

Role Description

We're hiring our second attorney: a hands-on counsel who will work directly with the CLO and own a large share of Protege's day-to-day legal work. This is not a narrow specialist seat. On any given week you'll move between:

• A data licensing agreement with a hospital system
• A de-identification question under HIPAA
• An NDA for a frontier lab
• A vendor BAA
• A cross-border transfer analysis

The two areas where you'll spend most of your time:

• Commercial contracts: Data license agreements, SOWs, NDAs, BAAs, DPAs, and vendor agreements — drafting, redlining, and negotiating with counterparties ranging from health systems and data aggregators to the largest AI builders in the world.
• Data & Privacy: HIPAA/CCPA/GDPR and de-identification strategy, business associate posture, privacy policies, cross-border data transfers, and emerging AI regulation. Privacy at Protege isn't a compliance checkbox — it's core to the product on multiple domains.

You'll be the person our business, partnerships, and engineering teams come to first. The legal function here runs through Slack, Notion, and Google Drive, with other AI tooling built into triage and drafting. Requests come in fast, priorities shift, and much of the structure you'll work within is structure you'll help build.

Qualifications

• You've negotiated and closed complex technology or data transactions end-to-end — ideally including data licensing, and ideally opposite technical counterparties.
• You've owned real pieces of a privacy program but see the whole picture and how it all hangs together: HIPAA and de-identification decisions, GDPR/CCPA compliance, DPAs and BAAs — not just reviewed someone else's work.
• You've run a high-volume legal queue where you were personally accountable for turnaround.
• You thrive in ambiguity and are proactive in finding the information you need to make informed decisions and guide the business forward.
• You've operated in a fast-moving, scrappy, high-growth environment where priorities changed weekly and structure didn't exist until you built it.
• You work the way we work: Slack, Notion, Google Drive, and AI systems in daily use.
• You bring high EQ to hard conversations — counseling colleagues under deadline pressure and negotiating across cultures and company sizes with practical, calm, solution-focused advice.
• JD and active bar membership in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.

Requirements

• 6+ years of relevant legal experience with significant depth in technology transactions and privacy (healthcare/HIPAA/GDPR/CCPA experience strongly preferred).
• Speed and throughput. You turn documents fast, juggle many matters simultaneously, and know when 80% today beats 100% next week.
• Genuine comfort with ambiguity. You're self-directed, you make judgment calls with incomplete information, and you don't wait to be handed a process — you build one.
• Fluency with modern tools. Our legal work lives in Slack, Notion, and Google Drive, and we use AI systems daily for triage and drafting.
• High EQ. You'll counsel colleagues under deadline pressure and negotiate with counterparties across cultures and company sizes.
• JD and active bar membership in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity compensation.
• Flexible work environment.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Generous vacation policy.
• Opportunities for professional development.

Company Description

We are building Protege to solve the biggest unmet need in AI — getting access to the right training data. The process today is time intensive, incredibly expensive, and often ends in failure. The Protege platform facilitates the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data.

Solving AI’s data problem is a generational opportunity. We’re backed by world-class investors and already powering partnerships with some of the most ambitious teams in AI. The company that succeeds will be one of the largest in AI — and in tech.

We’re a lean, fast-moving, high-trust team of builders who are obsessed with velocity and impact. Our culture is built for people who thrive on ambiguity, own outcomes, and want to shape the future of data and AI.