Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Counsel, Product role stands out because it sits at the intersection of product development and legal risk management in a technology environment where new capabilities can outpace established rules. The remit touches consumer-facing technology and embedded AI, areas where SaaS-adjacent product decisions often involve privacy, labeling, consumer protection, and regulatory interpretation alongside core product strategy.
For SaaS career builders, the long-term value is in becoming a cross-functional operator who can translate legal constraints into product-ready guidance without blocking iteration. Experience partnering closely with product, engineering, operations, and marketing is highly portable across subscription software companies, where counsel increasingly influences roadmap decisions, go-to-market execution, and scalable compliance processes. The emphasis on building repeatable approaches to risk is particularly relevant to SaaS organizations standardizing policies as product lines expand.
This role is best suited to a senior lawyer who prefers embedded partnership over purely transactional work and is comfortable making judgment calls with incomplete information. It will likely appeal to professionals who enjoy shaping processes, advising on novel product questions, and working close to teams shipping customer-facing technology in regulated and privacy-sensitive domains.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
OpenAI's Legal team plays a crucial role in furthering OpenAI's mission by tackling innovative, fundamental legal issues in AI. If you're passionate about doing significant and unique work as a technology lawyer, this team is for you. The team comprises professionals from diverse fields, including technology, AI, privacy, IP, corporate, employment, tax law, regulatory, and litigation.
About the Role
As a member of our Product Counsel team, you will assist with legal initiatives related to our consumer hardware products and technologies. You’ll work closely with the operations, marketing, product and engineering teams building our consumer hardware products. This is a unique opportunity to engage directly with the forefront of legal and AI consumer devices. This role reports to our AGC of Hardware.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Be the go-to counsel and partner for several teams focused on consumer hardware product development, including packaging, labeling, digitalization and user documentation.
Identify and address product, regulatory, privacy, and other legal risks and mitigations, including trademark, consumer protection, and product regulatory compliance.
Develop strategies for handling legal issues in creative ways and build processes for scaling flexible solutions that address risk.
Become an expert in AI embedded consumer hardware products and help strategize related legal policy positions.
You’ll enjoy this role if you:
Have 7+ years of experience with a mix of in-house and technology-focused law firm roles.
Understand the letter of the law and can approach problems in a practical, principled approach.
Build cross-functional relationships and communication styles that resonate with teams to balance risk-taking with responsible development.
Have a strong sense of ownership, are inquisitive and enthusiastic about technology, enjoy being continually challenged, and can demonstrate sound judgment in ambiguous situations.
Have a JD and license or qualification to practice in CA.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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