Sr. Legal Counsel

About the Job:

👋 I’m Katie, the Chief of Staff at Ashby. I am thrilled to be hiring our first in-house Legal Counsel to join our team.

I joined Ashby almost a year ago to partner with our CEO, Benji, and our leadership team on our ambitious growth plans. The Ashby team is customer obsessed, focused on a high level of execution and product velocity (over meetings) and is a team of incredible, thoughtful people who live by Ashby’s Operating Principles.

As part of my role, I have enjoyed building the foundations of Ashby’s in-house legal practice as my experience spans corporate law and technology startups. I’ve been able to partner with many stakeholders at Ashby on a breadth of legal matters, raised our series D with Shane Gallaher, negotiated with our incredible customers, helped launch products and protect our data and privacy, protected Ashby’s IP and have worked on our global expansion plans.

Ashby’s 100%+ year over year growth and exciting plans ahead make now the right time for us to hire our first dedicated in-house Legal Counsel.

We are looking for a motivated Sr. Legal Counsel to be a key contributor to Ashby’s growth by providing the Ashby team with day to day legal support and shape and scale our legal framework. As our Senior Legal Counsel, you’ll work closely with me and collaborate with our leadership and wider teams to provide incisive, commercial and solutions-oriented advice across a breadth of areas including commercial contract negotiation, data & privacy, AI regulation, employment, corporate and IP. We are looking for a Legal Counsel that has experience in rapidly scaling organizations, can strongly advocate to both customers and to internal leaders, is highly organized and thrives in a dynamic environment. You must be able to balance both timely execution and setting the long term legal foundations for Ashby to minimize risk while scaling.

Responsibilities

• Review, draft and negotiate a wide range of commercial agreements including customer agreements and Order Forms, vendor contracts, SaaS agreements, and help to proactively develop and iterate Ashby’s Terms of Service.

• Lead international privacy law compliance process, including reviewing and negotiating DPAs for vendors, and Ashby customers. Provide advice on privacy and data protection issues with demonstrated experience complying with GDPR and CCPA obligations.

• Work closely with our product team to proactively advise on legal and compliance considerations for new products and features. Collaborate with our PMM team to create external facing collateral, clearly outlining Ashby’s approach to compliance and FAQ for new products.

• Partnering closely with the Ashby Security team to respond to security incidents, including drafting relevant security related communications.

• Provide proactive advice by staying up to date on relevant industry regulations and developments, particularly in the regulation of the use of AI in the hiring process across our key regions and privacy law developments (GDPR and CCPA).

• Work on a wide range of legal matters as they arise or are proactively identified, including IP, employment, global expansion and fundraising.

• Help identify and advocate for solutions that proactively address legal risks across the business as we continue scaling and develop internal legal training and FAQ.

• Manage relationships with external counsel across commercial, privacy, corporate and employment areas.

• Help shape the legal function’s operations and structure as Ashby continues to grow, including identifying opportunities for innovation through technology.

Qualifications

• Juris Doctor from an accredited law school and active license to practice law in the US

• 6 - 8 years of legal experience across a top tier law firm and in-house experience at a fast growing startup

• Strong understanding of and experience in advising on privacy laws: GDPR and CCPA

• Demonstrated ability to handle diverse legal matters independently while maintaining excellent judgment and managing multiple priorities.

• Clear communication style that translates legal advice into plain english and next steps for our team to clearly understand and action.

• Bonus: Prior experience as an early legal hire in a fast growing SaaS or AI company

You should apply if:

• You’re excited about contributing to growth. You fundamentally view the role of an in-house legal team as a key contributor and cross-functional partner to fuel Ashby’s significant growth, rather than as a gatekeeper.

• You value ownership. You are excited about being the first dedicated Legal Counsel at Ashby and the breadth of the role.

• You are skilled at building cross-functional relationships. This role will require you to work with many different Ashby teams and with any of our 2,700+ customers. Establishing strong relationships, particularly with leadership team members is crucial to the success of this role.

• You are solutions-oriented. You provide highly commercial and clear legal advice that clearly considers relevant business context and you have strong operational follow-through.

• You are proactive and can ruthlessly prioritize. You can easily spot areas of improvement across the legal process and operations and can work with cross-functional teams on education and process improvements. You can simultaneously manage both longer term legal projects with the need for providing day to day advice.

• You are detail-oriented. Understanding the specifics of our products and business and applying relevant legal advice are critical in this role.

• You are adaptable and innovative. You embrace continuous learning and actively apply new insights to improve your work, including looking for new technologies to create more efficiency in the legal team.

Why you shouldn’t apply:

• You shy away from hands-on work. This position involves monitoring and responding to questions in our legal@ inbox, reviewing agreements, partnering with different Ashby team members on diverse legal matters, negotiating with customers and staying up to date on regulatory changes and translating those into next steps for Ashby. Being willing to “roll up your sleeves” and do the work rather than just advise is essential.

• Your preference is for academic legal and advisory work. We are looking for a lawyer who is primarily focused on driving growth at Ashby, tailors advice and recommendations to our business context and is highly practical.

• You aren’t comfortable advocating for Ashby in live discussions with customers or advocating for improvements or change internally based on legal advice or compliance requirements.

• You prefer an in-office environment. This is a remote role and is best-suited for self-starters who excel in an independent setting.

• You’re uncomfortable with change. We are a rapidly growing team and company, and the ability to stay flexible and thrive amid change is key to success here.

About Ashby

We’re building the next generation of enterprise software and we’re starting with a suite of products that empower talent leaders, recruiters, and hiring managers to be a driving force for revenue & efficiency via a holistic, data-centric talent strategy.

We just raised our series D bringing our total funding to $120m and are backed by great investors, including Alkeon, Lachy Groom Y Combinator and Elad Gil. We have over 2,700+ amazing customers including Snowflake, OpenAI, Shopify, Ramp, Notion, and Zapier (and many others who we cannot name!) and the Ashby team has 220+ people globally.

Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: we have tens of millions in ARR, growing >100% year over year, very low churn, very high product velocity and many years of runway. We’ll share more details once we meet, but you now probably have a good idea as to why we're hiring for this role 😅.

Interview Process

Our interview process is thorough - we assess if you are the right fit for Ashby and we will provide ample information for you to determine if Ashby is the right place for you. The process for this role is as follows:

• Recruiter Screen with Anna - 30min

• Hiring Manager Interview with our Chief of Staff (Katie) - 45min

• Practical Assessment

• Final Round - 2.5 hours

Benefits:

• 10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn’t feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby —do it when you feel financially comfortable.

• Unlimited PTO, and we will encourage you to take it.

• A minimum of 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, covered by Ashby. For folks outside the US, it may be longer to be in line with regional requirements.

• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive!

• $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.

• If you’re in the US, we offer top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby. In other countries, we provide high-quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, also fully covered by us.

• 401k match

Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.